All This Time
by JRW9699
Summary: Kara Zor-El, Legionnaire turned mercenary, is brought back to life on the planet Earth, the oldest of the civilised worlds. Forced into a contract under Lionel Luthor, Kara must solve a murder. The Kryptonian must wade through hordes of violent killers, in settings ranging from virtual paradises to seedy houses of prostitution, all the while trailed by the elusive Green Arrow
1. Chapter 1

**All This Time **

**Rating: 'M'**

**Characters (In Order of Appearance): Kara Danvers, J'onn J'onzz, David Singh, Quentin Lance, John Corben, Lena Luthor, Lionel Luthor, Lillian Luthor, Gideon, Anatoly Knyazev, Lucas Hilton, Alex Danvers, Laurel Lance, Cisco Ramon, Billy Malone, Felicity Smoak…?**

**Summary: Kara Zor-El, Legionnaire turned mercenary, is brought back to life on the planet Earth, the oldest of the civilised worlds. Forced into a contract under Lionel Luthor, Kara must solve a murder which the SCPD have ruled solved. The Kryptonian must wade through hordes of violent killers, in settings ranging from virtual paradises to seedy houses of prostitution, all the while trailed by the elusive Green Arrow.**

**Author's Note: Inspired by Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, this one is cyber-punk through and through guys. Gore, violence, swearing, sex, and death right from the beginning, most certainly not for the feint hearted. **

**Chapter 1**

Coming back from the dead, to quote J'onn J'onzz, is a bitch. Every single time. The closest likeness to it that Kara could describe was the sensation of being dragged backwards through a bramble bush, underwater, while getting throat-fucked, and your lungs are filled with jello. In a word, it sucked.

In the Legion they taught people to let go before they were put into storage. To stick it in neutral and float. It was the first thing they would drill into the new recruits from day one, the hard-eyed J'onzz pacing in front of them in the induction space. '_Don't worry'_ he would tell them, Kara remembered his voice vividly, '_you'll be ready for_ it'. Failing that, the fear of death was carved from them with the words '_don't worry, kid. They'll store it_'

_Don't worry, they'll store it_. It was a doubled-edged piece of wisdom. Both a bleak condemnation of the efficiency of the system the Legion had stood against, and a clue to the ever-elusive mental state required to navigate the harsh waters of re-sleeving. Whatever you are, whatever you feel, whatever you're thinking when they store you, that's what you'll be when you come out. So, the best thing to do is let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.

If they give you the time.

Kara came up thrashing. A violent cough forcing a glob of the amniotic storage fluid from her lungs, one hand plastered across her chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a weapon that was no longer there. A strong hand on her shoulder caused Kara to lash out, the hand that had been searching for wounds shooting to the throat of the person who had gripped her without thought. Rolling the rest of the way out of the floatation gel, Kara struck out, free hand striking her assailant in the nose and then the gut within but a second, and the man (so she assumed) dropped to the floor.

She stayed on him, sunk to the floor, crouched over him with her left hand still curled tightly around his throat. A fizzle and a jumble of voices sounded from behind her, snapping Kara back into reality a little. Raking her free hand through her hair to clear her view, Kara felt globs of the floatation gel run between her fingers, slicking back her hair like oil. Brining her hand back down, vision finally clear for the lack of hair and gel, Kara dimly registered her lack of clothing before turning to the rest of the room.

"Who the fuck is she?" One of the voices questioned, Kara couldn't tell which because of the surgical masks.

"I don't know!" Kara assumes it's the one holding the tablet who replies. "It's all fucking redacted!"

Beyond the two lab technicians still retreating away from her slowly, Kara noticed another figure, presumably security going from the cattle prod in his hand. Throwing him the most threatening glare she could muster, which required far more effort than she would have hoped for, Kara watched with a wicked grin as the security guard takes a few steps backwards. None of those three occupants of the room moved following that, and for half a minute Kara stayed in place, panting heavily, trying to adjust to her surroundings, and doing her best to figure out why it felt like she weighed so much.

"Miss Zor-El calm down." One of the technicians finally spoke.

That was when it clicked for her. Back on Krypton, Zor-El was a fairly common surname, her ancestors had been among the original settlers and so many had taken the same name as a mark of respect. Everyone knew how to pronounce it. That technician most certainly didn't, he spoke the same kind of Amanglic that was spoken on Krypton, but with none of the lilt or poetry, his voice was much harder, more drawl like. Still he had butchered the pronunciation, it had sounded more like 'Zo-Ral' from him.

Add to that she still felt too heavy.

Then the realisation crashed through her blurred perception like a brick through frosted glass.

Offworld.

Somewhere along the line they had taken Kara Zor-El (d.h.) and shipped her…somewhere. Krypton, to Kara's knowledge, was the only habitable planet in the Corvus star system, which meant a long range needlecast download to somewhere too far away from home.

Ignoring the words of the technician Kara looked around, beginning to process her situation, she needed to figure out where she was. The room looked to her exactly how old-world prisons had been described to her. Dull grey concrete walls, harsh neon lighting tubes overhead, and a large steel door was set into the wall on the far side. The re-sleeving facilities on Krypton were so much more glamorous, Kara had seen them more than a few times, pastel colours, pretty faces, rooms with thermostats set perfectly. After all, being re-sleeved meant that one had paid their debt to society, Kara reasoned, shouldn't they be sent off with a fresh start and a sunny disposition?

"How…" Kara tried, new vocal cords were always a challenge, and clearly the ones the belonged to her new sleeve hadn't been used for a while. "How long? How long have I been down?"

The technician with the tablet began scrolling through the files again before she looked back up to Kara. "A hundred and fifty years."

_A hundred and fifty?_

Kara vaguely registered the sound of choking, she was clearly applying too much pressure to the throat of the man she had pinned down, but she ignored it. The information was a little difficult to process, there had been no trial, no forewarning of how long she would be down for, a hundred and fifty was a little too long to process, even for her. With the weight of that revelation pressing upon her, Kara leaned back and took her hand from the throat of the man beneath her, moving slowly backwards until her back pressed against the base of the storage tank she had escaped from. Taking a shallow breath in, Kara reached up, blocked one nostril and blew tank fluid out through the other.

"Fucking hate getting shot." She mumbled to herself before looking up and addressing the technicians. "Wanna tell me where I am? Itemize my rights or something?"

"Right now, you don't have any rights."

_Asshole._

It was the guard that had spoken, a grim smile stitched across his face. Kara briefly rolled her stiff neck and snorted the other nostril clean.

"Want to tell me where I am?"

The guard hesitated for a moment, glanced up at the roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before passing it on, then looked back to Kara. "Sure. Why not? Iron Heights Penitentiary, Starling City."

"What planet genius?" Kara spoke sharply, throwing him another glare.

"Earth."

_XXX_

A doctor finally took Kara away from the re-sleeving facility, leading her down a long white corridor, the floor covered in scuff marks from what Kara assumed were the rubber wheels of gurneys. The doctor was moving a quite the pace, and Kara struggled to keep up with her, wrapped as she was in a thin grey towel and still dripping with tank fluid. Everything about the doctor's manner was superficially bedside, Kara noted, though there stood a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of hardcopy documents under one arm and she was clearly in a rush. Kara didn't even want to consider how many re-sleevings she had to oversee in a single day.

"You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or two," She recited. "There might be minor aches and pains, tremors, visual or auditory hallucinations, it's all normal. Sleep should resolve any issues. If you have any recurring comp…"

"I know." Kara cut over her. "I've done this before."

Finally, the two came to a stop at a side door with the word _shower_ stencilled into frosted glass. The doctor steered Kara inside and paused for a moment, as if to study her.

"I've used showers before too." Kara threw her a condescending smirk.

The doctor simply nodded. "When you're finished, there's an elevator at the end of the hall, discharge is on the next floor. Don't uh…leave in a hurry, the warden wants to see you."

To the best of her knowledge, Kara was sure the 'manual' said to avoid any string mental shocks to the newly re-sleeved. This doctor didn't seem to care much for that, though given the stack of papers under her arm, Kara deduced that she must have read her file, or at least, whatever was available, and assumed she could handle it. Kara did her best to do just that.

"What does he want?"

"He didn't choose to share that with me." Her words had an edge of frustration that she shouldn't have allowed to show. "Perhaps your reputation precedes you."

"Perhaps." Kara smirked. On an impulse, she flexed her new face into a warm, disarming smile. "Doctor, I've never been here before. To Earth. I've never dealt with your police, should I be worried?"

The doctor looked at Kara intently, and behind her eyes Kara could see both fear and curiosity, perhaps her reputation really did precede her.

"With a woman like you," She managed finally. "I would've thought they'd be the worried ones."

"Yeah, right."

With a smile and a curt nod, the doctor retreated, the frosted door sliding shut behind her. Quickly ditching the towel and stepping into the shower, Kara whistled away her disquiet tunefully, doing her best not to slip into a song from her home, just in case they were listening. With careful, almost surgical movements, Kara ran soap and hands along her new body, finally taking the time to get to know it. Her sleeve was in her late twenties, possibly early thirties, Protectorate standard, with a fighter's build. She could feel a tugging at the edges of her senses, the sensation was, she reasoned, a military custom carved onto her nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, pretty advanced too, Kara quickly discovered. It had been the reason, she realised as she tested the muscle response under the wet heat of the shower, that she had been able to drop the technician without a problem but still had difficulty breathing. There was hardwired training in her new sleeve, not just the neurachem but combat conditioning and reflex aggression. Kara had attacked the technician because her sleeve _remembered_ how to attack.

"Cool." Kara hummed out aloud.

Still, it paled in comparison to what she was used to, but that hardly came as a surprise. The Legion's neurachem was centuries beyond anything that existed on the open or black market, even CTAC R&D were lightyears behind. Then again, Kara supposed, she had been on the stack for almost two centuries, maybe things had changed.

Turning back to her new sleeve, Kara continued her evaluation. There was a tightness in her chest that signalled something deeper than adjustment issues, it felt like a nicotine addiction. Rolling her eyes, the Kryptonian huffed unceremoniously, she'd only just managed to kick the cigarettes before she'd hit the stack, having to do it again was a daunting prospect. There was also a considerable amount of scarring across her torso and forearms, and Kara took the time to run a finger along each and every one of them. Every sleeve has a history, she had learnt that early on, and if that kind of thing was an issue well…that's why synthetics were such a big market. Kara shuddered a little at that, she always had hated synthetic sleeves. Back in the day she had likened it to a draughty house, the nerve endings never seemed sensitive enough and everything tasted like curried sawdust.

Stepping from the shower into the changing cubicle, Kara found a neatly folded white blouse and grey pants that looked suited to summer, yet somewhat professional at the same time. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch and a pair of stud-like earrings. Taking a deep breath Kara turned to face the mirror.

It was always difficult, seeing a new face, looking into the glass and seeing a total stranger staring back. During her training, J'onn had likened it to pulling an image from the depths of a stereogram. Not that J'onn ever actually understood what they had to go through. _Lucky bastard._ Not even the Legionnaires, despite their frankly god-like training, were wholly used to it, the feeling that couldn't be shaken, that the face in the mirror wasn't your own but someone else through a window.

Kara stood before the mirror and idly towelled herself dry, getting used to the face. It was Caucasian, which was a comfortable lack of change, nothing drastic, and the overwhelming impression Kara got was that if there was ever a line of least resistance in life, her new face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features of her face managed to look weather-beaten. The hair was blonde too, though shorter than hers had been, and the eyes were a deep blue. All in all, Kara summarised, she still looked remarkably more like her birth sleeve than she had any right to given the mass jump in time and location.

Finally, suitably dry and as accustomed as she could hope to be with her new body after less than an hour out of the tank, Kara turned and got dressed. With a final glance at the mirror, she slipped in the earrings, strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the warden.

It was four-fifteen, local time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

There had been guards waiting for her the moment she had stepped out of the shower. Kara really shouldn't have been surprised, if anyone would have had access to her files, it was the warden, and from the show of force, he was afraid of her. The guards had been wholly silent as they escorted her to the warden's office, and all four of them remained just outside the double doors she was sent through.

The office spoke volumes. The windows were blacked out, letting only dim streams of grey light through them, and there were no artificial lights that she could see. Beyond that the room held an air of faux-intellectualism, aged oak panelling made up the walls, shelves of books everywhere but all coated in a layer of dust, stacks of paper work clearly left unattended filled most all of the available space. Clearly, he was not a man who existed beyond his job. The warden himself was a thin, severe-looking man, suited in black, sat behind a superficially grandiose desk.

The warden didn't look up from his tablet as Kara took measured steps towards his desk, simply waving a hand towards the empty chair that sat in front of her. With a reluctant sigh, Kara took the seat, not seeing much point in rebelling. Even once she was sat, the man continued to ignore her presence, as if she was beneath him.

"I'm warden David Singh, chief executive for Iron Heights. And you…" The warden began finally looking up at her for a brief moment, and in his eyes, Kara saw the same mixture of emotions that the doctor had hit her with downstairs. "File's incomplete, parts of it sealed. What is here?" The warden paused for a second, beginning to scroll through what Kara was forced to assume was her own file. "Espionage, terrorism, crimes against the state, and more murders than I care to count. And when they finally arrested you, you gunned down your own partner in the stack. Report says he was shot from behind, so…along with everything else, you're a coward."

Kara's head dropped as the warden paused again. It wasn't shame she felt, that report was fabricated and she knew it, it was anger that began to boil in her veins. With the shock of re-sleeving, the trauma of her death, the information overload since she had arrived on Earth, she had almost forgotten about Jimmy. Hearing the warden accuse her of being the one to kill him, and with such cowardice…it took almost all of her willpower not to leap across the table and throttle him there and then.

"Don't you have anything to say?" The warden pushed after a second of silence.

"Oh, I'm-I'm sorry, I was waiting for a question." Kara began with a smirk. "It was all monologue there for a while, so I kinda tuned out."

With a disgruntled glare, the warden slid a hardcopy document across the desk to her.

"Kara Zor-El," He began, mispronouncing her name with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. "This is a document certifying that your D.H.F. was shipped from the Kryptonian Justice Administration, received here intact, and sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed-circuit monitors. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign here."

Kara took a pen from the desk and wrote her name in someone else's handwriting next to the warden's finger. Singh separated the top and bottom copies, and handed Kara the pink one. As Singh tidied away his paperwork Kara glanced up and search in vain for any sign of the cameras.

Seemingly satisfied with the hardcopy, Singh turned back to her. "You have also been provided with clothing and incidentals as per the specification of Luthor Corp. which had leased you. As such you are the property of Lionel Luthor for the duration of that lease."

"Property? What about my rights?" Kara spoke quickly.

Singh seemingly ignored her, and Kara couldn't help but to think back to the words of the grunt in the tank room. _You don't have any rights._

"Failure to comply with the terms of this parole will result in your immediate de-sleeving, and return here, to serve out the rest of your sentence, which…does not appear to have an end date"

Kara remained silent, allowing Singh to continue his monologue. "You're going to screw this up. Do something violent, hurt someone, kill someone. I know people like you."

"There are no people like me." Kara answered, steeling her expression. _Not anymore._

"Well then," Singh seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. "You're a lucky women, Zor-El. Don't waste the opportunity."

The only thing Kara could think as she stood and turned to leave was; _don't they ever get tired of saying it?_

The paper copy of her parole document was neatly folded and slid into a pocket. Without so much as a glance back towards the warden, Kara headed back out through the doors. No soon as Kara had made it through them and back into the reception space, she noticed the doctor waiting for her. On seeing Kara, she took a step forward and held out a small white card.

"Miss Zor-El."

Kara paused.

"There shouldn't be any major problems with adjusting," She said. "This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there is anything major, call this number."

Kara put out and are and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that she hadn't noticed before. The Neurachem was kicking in. Her hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the paperwork and she was gone, crossing the rest of the reception and pushing open the door that lead to the main exit without a word. Kara knew it was a little ungracious, but she was firm in the belief that no one in that prison had earned her gratitude.

Singh's words washed around her mind. _You're a lucky woman_. Sure, Kara thought, a hundred and eighty lightyears from her home, wearing another woman's body, and on a rental agreement to some corporate asshole she'd never heard of, freighted in to do a job that she hadn't even been briefed on. Fail and return to storage. Kara felt so lucky she could have burst into song as she walked out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

The entrance hall was huge, and all but deserted. It looked, Kara thought, like nothing more than the Vathlo rail terminal back on Krypton. Beneath a tiled roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.

Download central.

These people, Kara knew, wouldn't recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the homecomers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face or body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a few generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend.

There was one family Kara noticed as she walked through the hall. A couple who were joined by a middle-aged woman, a woman who called them '_mommy' _and '_daddy'_. '_She was a seven-year-old girl_', she heard the father shout. The clinical detachment of the doctor who had returned the girl was something Kara almost respected in a twisted way.

"Quentin Lance." Kara was suddenly accosted by an older looking man. "I'll be driving you to the Luthor residence."

Something about the man made Kara think she should know him, there was an odd familiarity to his features which she couldn't quite place. _Altered Carbon_. She had ridden so many sleeves, worn so many faces that weren't her own, see so many more. Perhaps déjà vu was simply to be expected after living a life bouncing from form to form. Her driver was a man in his late forties. Under the ink-black discs of his shades, he wore sharp cheekbones and a wide slash of a mouth that was set in a dry line. The sunglasses were jammed on a wide nose. His head almost cleanly void of hair in a way that suggested a life lived with stress. He had wrapped himself in a sharp suit, reminiscent of something from the old world, and not at all similar to the grandiose of Kryptonian attire.

"They put a kid in that old lady?"

Lance offered her a tight, grim smile as they began to walk. "Victim restitution. The state just gives you what they have on hand, and it's always the broken-down crap like that. The prisons lease out the, uh…good sleeves," Lance made a vague gesture to the body Kara was wearing. "For a profit."

"Very humane."

"Huh, that's underselling it."

"They don't have that where I come from."

"And where would that be?"

Lance timed his question just as he and Kara stepped through the exit, and the warmth of the sunlight hit her in the face. Kara screwed up her new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, Kara could see sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not-particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly, and Kara caught the faint odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the hum of traffic.

"…and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you…"

The squawk of a poorly operated amp-box hit them as they went down the steps from the exit. Kara glanced across the landing lot and saw the crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESILUTION 653! ONLY GOD CAN RESURECT! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speakers.

"What's this?"

"Catholic," Lance answered, his lips curling into a grimace. "Old time religious sect."

"Never heard of them."

"They don't believe you can digitise a human being without losing the soul."

"Not a widespread faith then."

"Just on Earth," He said sourly. "I think the Vatican – that's the head church – financed a couple of those cryoships to Starhaven and Latimer…"

"I've been to Starhaven, I never ran into anything like this."

Lance simply scoffed. "The ships only left at the turn of the century, they won't get there for a couple more decades yet."

They skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at Kara. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped her sleeve's unsettled reflexes and Kara made a blocking motion before she got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and Kara took it with a placating smile.

"You will not be forgiven."

"Come on, let's go." Lance was steering her away, one hand on her arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. Kara shook him off politely but equally firmly.

"We in a hurry?"

"I think we both have better things to do." He said, tight-lipped, glancing back to where others were being accosted by the crowd.

"I might have wanted to talk to her."

"Looked like you wanted to take her head off." Lance snarked back.

"That's just this sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and she tripped it. Most people do get to lie down for a few hours after downloading. I'm a little on edge."

The lift turned out to be a rather rakish-looking Lockhead-Mitoma limousine decked out in a shiny chrome. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was quickly hinged up by Lance, and it was pulled shut equally as quickly as they both clambered into their seats. Lance immediately moved for the pilot's chair and set the cruiser in motion. Kara steadied herself against the lift if the cruiser and found her way to a window seat. As they spiralled up, Kara craned her neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about a hundred meters up and dropped its nose slightly, Kara sank back into the arms of the automould and looked down to the leaflet still in her hands.

CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? It demanded rhetorically. The word 'machine' had been printed in script designed to resemble an archaic computer display. 'Soul' was in flowering stereographic letters that danced all over the page. Kara turned over for the answer.

NO!

"So cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn't? Interesting." Kara looked back at the glowing digital of the leaflet after catching Lance's curious look in the rear-view mirror.

"Yeah, spirt savers and after lifers. 653 fails and they still won't shut up."

"What's 653?" Kara questioned, there has been reference to it all over the placards.

"It was a test case that went trough the UN Court." Lance answered. "Star City prosecutors office wanted to subpoena a Catholic murder victim who's in storage."

"Why wouldn't you spin someone up if they're witness to their own murder?"

"Archdiocese says you only get the sleeve you're born with. They spin you up for anything, even to testify to murder, then you go to hell." There was something muttered by Lance that Kara couldn't quite make out, but she could be sure that it wasn't pleasant.

"I see. So, your opinion of them isn't a generous one."

Lance almost turned to face her. "I hate those freaks. They've been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They've been responsible for more misery than any other organisation in history. You know they don't even let their adherents practice birth control? And they've stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. The only thing that can be aid in their favour is that D.H.F. has mostly stranded them here on Earth."

"Answer me a question?"

"If I can."

"Well, if these guys don't practice birth control, there's gotta be a lot of them, right? And it's not like Earth has been a hub of activity for the last few centuries, so…how come they aren't running things?"

Lance simply shot her an unpleasant smile. "Storage."

Kara tapped her hand against the back of her neck, before stopping to wonder if the gesture was in use on Earth. It was the universal site for a cortical stack, but cultural quirks don't always work like that.

"Storage, of course." From the look on Lance's face, the gesture did translate. "There's no special exemption for them?"

"Nope," Lance smirked. "ten years or three months, it's all the same to them. Death sentence every time. They never come off the stack. Cute, huh?"

Kara didn't answer, it didn't need answering to her. Outside of the window, the monochrome of the city washed by. Metal and concrete and neon blurring together in a cacophony of silence as the pattering of rain against glass filled the air.

"So, what were you in for?" Lance broke the silence again.

"You know, little bit of this, little bit of that." Kara answered vaguely, still looking out the window. "Blew some shit up and killed some people." Lance met her eyes in the mirror. "Some people just need killing."

"Oh yeah? And how do you decide who deserves to die?"

"Depends on the day. Anything can set me off. Interstellar dictatorship, genocide, people who ask too many personal questions." Lance smirked at her. "Right now, I'm feeling pretty hostile towards Lionel Luthor. Whoever the fuck he is."

"Oh, come on, everyone knows Luthor. He's one of the first founding Meths."

"What's a Meth?"

"You've never heard of Meths?" Lance scoffed. "You're dressed like one."

"Like I said, I'm not from here."

"_And the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years._" Lance quoted as the cruiser began to rise through the clouds. "It's Luthor, he's almost four centuries old."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

From Iron Heights the transport had flown south, along the coast for no more than ten minutes before the steep climb in height, breaking through the clouds. By that time, the light through the windows had turned a warm gold with the sun's brightness above the cloud layer.

The construct before them was beautiful.

Kara had never seen anything like it. Twisting into the sky, a hand reaching out to the stars themselves, somehow natural despite its obviously human origins. Shinning white in the light of the sun, it was truly magnificent, the construct almost reminiscent of bone in its smoothness and organic visage. Beyond the smog and cloud of the city below, it was reminiscent of the tales of Olympus, the home of the Gods.

"They call it the Aerium," Lance provided, clearly sensing Kara's intrigue. "Guess they don't have this where you come from either, huh?"

As the cruiser continued the journey to the very top of the tower, Lance spoke again. "So, where you from? Home planet kinda thing?"

"Not here." Kara spoke lowly, still fascinated by the Aerium.

"That's pretty vague." Lance grumbled.

"You ask a lot of questions." Kara remarked evenly.

"You sound like my daughter," Lance scoffed. "She always said I could find a way to talk to anybody."

"Especially when they're trapped in a car with you." Kara snarked.

The transport sideslipped and banked, giving Kara a view of the Luthor estate, the topmost structure of the Aerium. It took up the entirety of the area, edging in from the furthest reach in neatly manufactured tones of green and gravel around a sprawling tile-roofed mansion big enough to house a small army. The walls were white, the roofing coral and the army, if there was one, was out of sight. Any security systems Luthor had installed were very low-key. As they moved lower, Kara made out the discreet haze of a power fence along one border of the grounds. Barely enough to distort the view from the house.

Nice.

Less than a dozen meters up over one of the immaculate lawns, Lance kicked in the landing brake with what seemed like unnecessary violence. The transport shuddered from end to end and they came down hard amidst flying clods of turf.

Kara shot Lance a reproachful look which he ignored. He threw open the hatch and climbed out. After a moment Kara joined him on the damaged lawn, prodding at the torn grass with the toe of one shoe.

"Really stuck that landing. You're not a driver, are you?"

"I said I worked security." Lance began, fixing a detectives shield to the belt of his suit pants. "I didn't say for who."

"So this hasn't been a conversation, it's been an interrogation."

"Last chance," Lance tried. "Just give me a name."

Kara gritted her teeth for a moment before answering. "Kara Zor-El. Look me up."

Stepping away from Lance, Kara moved towards the gravel path leading to the house. She had hardly made it ten paces before Lance was on her again.

"You can't be," He spoke sharply. "All the Legionnaires died."

"All except one."

The group of suits that had been moving towards them since the landing cam to a stop about ten meters away. There were three large men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They had been standing under the eaves but had quickly made their way towards the transport the moment it touched down.

"Not another step, Lance." The one at the front spoke, aiming a handgun in the detective's direction.

"Oh, put your toy down, I'm SCPD and you know it, Corben." Lance spoke sharply, ignoring the threats and stepping around Kara to walk towards them. "So, put them down and tell me where your boss is because I really would like a fucking word."

A young woman appeared from the side of the house, tennis racket in hand, and moved across the lawn towards them. When she was no more than fifteen meters away, she stopped, tucked the tennis racket under one arm. From the slight widening of the eyes of one of the grunts, Kara guessed that they had called her on an internal mike.

Slick.

"Detective Lance."

She was beautiful in a sun, sea and sand sort of way and the sports shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal effect. Raven hair brushed her shoulders as she moved and there had been a hint of milk white teeth when she spoke. She wore sweat bands at forehead and wrists and from the dew on her brow they were not for show. There was a finely toned muscle in her legs and a substantial bicep stood out when she lifted her arm. Moderate breasts strained the fabric of the leotard, and Kara wondered if the body was hers.

"You're trespassing on private property."

Lance didn't rise to the threatening tone in the young woman's voice. "Go and fetch mummy and daddy, Lena."

"Miss Luthor to you, detective."

As the woman – Lena – stepped closer, she turned her attention to Kara.

"Kara Zor-El?" Her pronunciation was perfect.

"That's me." Kara spoke neutrally, ignoring the way the young woman seemed to be sizing her up like a piece of meat.

"You were supposed to be met at the storage facility." It sounded like an accusation, Kara simply grinned.

"Well, I was."

"Not by the police." She turned back to Lance. "I assume it was you who arranged for our chauffeur to be pulled over on some trumped-up emissions charge."

"No, _Miss Luthor_, that would be Traffic Control," Lance said politely. "I have no jurisdiction in that division."

Lena sneered.

"Oh, I'm sure you haven't, detective. And I'm sure none of your friends work there either." The voice turned patronising. "My father will have him released before the sun goes down, you know."

Kara glanced sideways to see Lance's reaction, but there was none.

"You're not welcome here, detective." Lena spoke in a freezing voice.

"Yeah," Lance rolled his eyes. "Well, there's your new pet terrorist. Have a good evening, Miss Luthor." Lance started walking back towards the transport. "You're welcome."

"The terrorist can hear you," Kara remarked, arms crossed over her chest. "I'm standing right here."

Lance rounded on her. "Yeah, good. 'Cause we're not done, you and me."

Lance clapped her unexpectedly on the shoulder and headed back to the transport at an easy pace. Halfway there he suddenly stopped and turned back.

"Here. Almost forgot. You'll need these."

He dug in his breast pocket and tossed Kara a small packet. She caught it reflexively and looked down. Nicotine patches.

"Be seeing you."

He swung himself aboard the transport and slammed the hatch. Through the glass, Kara saw him looking at her. The transport lifted on full repulse, pulverising the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west. Kara watched it out of sight.

"Charming." Lena spoke, mostly to herself.

"Miss Luthor?"

She swung around. The look on her face was one of intrigue and, if Kara wasn't mistaken, a little bit of attraction, though it was largely masked by a visage of annoyance.

"My father sent a car for you, Miss Zor-El. Why didn't you wait for it?"

"No one told me to wait for a car, I figured Lance there was my ride."

Lena bit her tongue in annoyance, easily visible to any observer and muttered something about incompetence and prisons. She stood still facing Kara, flushed with annoyance, breasts rising and falling distractingly. When they stick a body in the tank, it goes on producing hormones pretty much the way it would if one were asleep. Kara became abruptly aware that she was incredibly aroused and did her best to not make her discomfort obvious.

"You should have waited."

"Miss Luthor, if I'd waited, I'd still be there now. Can we go inside?"

Her eyes widened a little, and Kara suddenly saw in them how old she really was. Then she lowered her gaze and summoned composure. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.

"I'm sorry, Miss Zor-El. I've forgotten my manners. The police, as you can see, have not been sympathetic. But I am very sorry, I'm not usually like this. None of us are." She gestured around as if to say the two armed guards would have been bearing garlands of flowers. "Please accept my apologies."

"Of course."

"So," She began raising her hand. "I'm Lena Luthor." Kara took the offered hand it and shook it gently. "Welcome to Suntouch House."

_XXX_

The inside of the house was light and airy. A maid met them at the veranda and took Lena Luthor's tennis racket for her without a word. They went down a marbled hallway hung with art that, to Kara's untrained eye, looked old. Sketches of Gagarin and Armstrong, Empathist renderings of Erok-El and Shayera Hol. At the end of the gallery, set on a plinth, was something like a narrow tree made out of crumbling red stone, sprawling up and beyond the ceiling, and it's sprouts glowing an ethereal blue. Kara paused in front of it and Miss Luthor had to backtrack from the right turn she was making.

"That should be in a museum."

"I share my father's weakness for Elder Civilisation artefacts." Her face underwent a change that Kara caught in the corner of her eye. She was reassessing. Kara turned for a closer look at her face. "I collect them, among other things."

"Is it alive?" Kara asked breathlessly, taking a step towards the tree.

"No one knows, this is the only Songspire tree on Earth." There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that Kara liked her better for. "No one really knows what they are. They could have functioned as part of Elder Civilisation architecture. On Mars, they grew to be hundred of meters tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might have been around since the founding of the Roman Empire."

"I know," Kara whispered, hand reaching out to lightly stroke one of the blossoms of the tree. "I've seen them."

"Argo, of course." Lena answered tentatively.

"It must have cost a fortune to ship here."

"Money wasn't an object, Miss Zor-El." The mask was back in place.

They made double time down the right-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for the unscheduled diversion. With each step Miss Luthor's breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and Kara took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work. Again, Shayera Hol with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket.

_Not much help_.

The lounge in which Lionel Luthor resided was built on the end of the house's west wing. Miss Luthor led Kara right up to an unobtrusive wooden door and pressed it open for her, the sunlight bursting through the opening.

"Good luck, Miss Zor-El."

Kara lifted a hand to shade her eyes and stepped through the door. There was an upper level to the lounge, and the wall to her immediate left was comprised largely of glass panes. The floor was the same marble of the corridor, the walls has a similar theme but were mostly comprised of mahogany bookcases, unlike the office of the warden back at Iron Heights there was no layer of dust on Lionel Luthor's shelves. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.

"Miss Zor-El." A deep voice suddenly spoke.

Kara turned slowly, giving no sign of the shock she had felt on the sudden call. On the upper balcony was Luthor, looking down at her. There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.

"I apologise my driver was unable to pick you up, the police have been very…intrusive in my affairs of late."

"That's alright," Kara began, keeping her eyes on the room around her, refusing to look up at Luthor. "The ride was very instructive."

"Hmm. Yes, I'm sure it was. Details are, after all, a Legionnaire's stock in trade. Or were, I should say. '_Immersion and total absorb_'. Wasn't that the term? '_Whatever answer you may seek, it is precisely where you are not looking._"

"You've read J'onzz."

"I was alive during the Uprising, yes."

"Yeah? So was I."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Luthor looked like a Man Who Read. There was a favourite Photoplay star back on Krypton called Nim An-Dor, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cut swathes through the brutal tyranny of the early settlement years. It was, Kara recalled her father telling her as a child, questionable in how accurate it's portrayal of the Quellists was, but a good flick nonetheless. She had seen it herself once or twice. Luthor looked a lot like an older version of An-Dor in that role. He was slim and elegant with a full head of iron grey hair which he wore loosely in curls that reached his shoulders, and hard black eyes. The book in his hands and the shelves around him were like an utterly natural extension of the powerhouse of a mind that looked out from those eyes.

They looked at each other for a while as Kara tried to decide if she was angry at the man or not. She had been dragged halfway across the settled universe, dumped into a new body and thrown into a parole agreement it seemed she had no choice but to accept. Rich people tend to do that, she thought. They have the power and see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please.

On the other hand, Kara considered, no one at Suntouch House was yet to mispronounce her name. Plus, she really didn't have a choice. Whatever the job Luthor had in store for her was without a doubt one that no human on Earth was going to take willingly, but it still meant parole if she completed it, which was pretty substantial given that her sentence was functionally endless.

"It's all in the distant past for me, you see," Luthor began, following the path of the balcony towards the steps. "But for you, of course, it's all rather different. There are very few of us now who saw first-hand what the Legion could do. And I must admit that I had a very begrudging admiration for you." Luthor began to descend the steps that sat in front of the large glass window, finally on eye-level with Kara. "The most formidable fighting force in the galaxy."

Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty lightyears from Earth. The most far flung is four times that distance, and some of the colony transports continued to strive out further. If some maniac started rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toy, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information via hyperspatial needlecast so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology, but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment shit hit the fan, the marines would be arriving in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won.

That's no way to run a Protectorate.

So was born CTAC. The Colonial Tactical Assault Corps. Digitised and freighted minds of a crack combat team. Numbers hadn't counted for much in war for a long time, to Kara's knowledge most every military victory of the previous three centuries had been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. They could decant the crack D.H.F. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems and steroid built bodies, and shoot them up with reclamation drugs.

But even then, they're in bodies they don't know, on a world they don't know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they've probably never even heard of and certainly don't understand. The climate is different, the language and culture is different, the wildlife and vegetation is different, the atmosphere is different. Even the gravity. They know nothing, and even if they're downloaded with implanted local knowledge, it would still be a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they're likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving.

That's where the Legion was developed. J'onn J'onzz had been tasked with creating a fighting force to replace CTAC, and he had almost done it before leading a mutiny and becoming the biggest pain in the Protectorate's ass since Magrathea had crippled the galactic economy. Hyper-advanced neurachem that made CTAC look like children was an incredible first step, but it was still physical. CTAC had nothing that touched the pure mind, and it was the pure mind that was freighted. That was where the Legion started. J'onzz took psychospiritual techniques from a hundred different cultures and distilled them into a training system so complete that the Protectorate had pre-emptively forbidden any graduate of it from holding any political or military position.

They weren't soldiers, not exactly.

"That would sound better if we hadn't lost."

"This," Luthor came to a stop an arm's reach away from her and held out the book. "Might interest you."

When Kara reached out to take the book, she noticed it was with far less mechanical precision as she had taken the doctor's card. Download dues. The leather-bound tome was familiar in her hands, and Kara's movements were painfully delicate as she unwrapped the binder and opened the book.

"Oh, it might be all corneal streaming now," Luthor began with a faint smile as Kara delicately observed that pages. "But there's something about the simplicity of holding the written word in your hand. The very heft of it. As men have done for countless of centuries before us. It is a tie to our shared past."

She stopped turning the pages, her eyes resting on a flawless sketch of a Songspire tree.

"Where did you get this?"

"I bought it at auction," Luthor answered. "Supposedly it is written by J'onzz himself in his own hand. Judging by your reaction, I'd say I got what I paid for."

The smug grin on his face made something in Kara snap. "Listen to me," She closed the book and fixed the binder as she spoke threateningly. "I spent this entire day getting well and truly fucked around with, so let me be painfully clear. Some things can't be bought, like me. Now I didn't ask you to bring me back into this world. In fact, I fought a war to stop people like you from happening." Kara closed what little distance remained between her and Luthor. "So, if someone doesn't tell me right now what the fuck this is all about…I might just lose my temper." She finished by pressing the book against Luthor's chest.

They stayed like that for a moment, Kara staring Luthor straight in the eye. So close as they were, Kara could see the age in Lionel Luthor, behind the eyes was a man wholly too old for his body. A man, quite evidently, who wasn't used to people standing against him the way that Kara did.

"Understood," Luthor hummed lowly, taking the book from Kara and placing it down on the granite table that filled much of the room space. Placing the book down carefully Luthor indicated to a hardcopy document that sat upon the table. "Now this, is a full pardon, signed by the president of The Protectorate."

"No one had that kind of power."

"Power," Luthor began with a smirk. "Is a matter of influence, Miss Zor-El. And I have had a great deal of influence at the U.N. If you agree to my terms, your sentence will be reduced to time served. And then I will open up a very generous line of credit in your name. DNA trace accessible. And finally, when the investigation is over, I will pay you a salary of fifty million U.N. credits, that's a fortune. You can go anywhere, choose any life. All I ask, is that you solve a murder."

Luthor began walking towards a desk.

"Whose?"

Without a word, Luthor pulled a white cloth from the wall, revealing the damage behind it. "Mine."

The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item – Luthor must have freighted the gene code in from Krypton and cultivated the tree on Earth. That struck Kara as almost as extravagant as the Songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. Back on Krypton mirrorwood grew in forests on three continents, and practically every dive from Vathlo to Kryptonopolis had a bar top carved out of the stuff. Kara moved closer to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon, and the dull rust of dried blood was seeped into the gash and trickled down the wall. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downwards.

Kara would reluctantly admit that she was intrigued at the very least.

"So…Miss Zor-El, where would you like to begin?" Luthor smirked, clearly reading her interest.

"Who found your body?"

"My daughter, Naomi.

He broke off as someone opened the door. A moment later, the maid who had attended Lena Luthor walked into the room bearing a tray with a decanter of amber liquid and glasses. Luthor was wired with an internal microphone, like everyone else at Suntouch House Kara noted.

The maid set down her tray on the desk, poured with a machine-like precision and then withdrew on a short nod from Luthor. Kara opted to ignore the glass that had been poured for her. The shakiness associated with downloading was beginning to assert itself on her, and in addition Kara had noticed an unwelcome scratchiness in her feet and fingers which she assumed was nicotine dependency. Alcohol on top of everything else would finish her. Luthor continued to stare after the maid blankly for a while.

Back from the dead, it really was no joke.

"Naomi?" Kara prompted him gently.

He blinked. "Oh. Yes. She barged in here, wanting something. Probably the keys to one of the limos. I'm an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is my youngest."

"How old?"

"Twenty-three."

"Do you have many children?"

"Yes, I do." Luthor smiled faintly. "When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters."

"Do they live with you?"

"Naomi does, as does Lena, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now."

"How is Naomi?" Kara stepped her tone down a little.

"She's in psychosurgery," said Luthor shortly. "She'll pull through, my godson Oliver had her rushed into hospital." At Kara's questioning look Luthor continued. "He happened upon…the situation…not long after Naomi, he was delivering some business documents on behalf of his father. Do you need to speak to them?"

"Not at the moment." Kara looked back up to the gouge in the wall thoughtfully. "It was an energy weapon?"

"Yes. A particle blaster."

"This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?"

"Yes".

"Nothing else was damaged, broken, or disturbed in any way?"

"No, nothing." From the look on his face Kara could tell Luthor wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet.

"Do you own a weapon that would do this?"

"Yes, it was mine. I keep it for personal protection in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else was removed. Do you need to see inside it?"

"Not at the moment, thank you." Kara knew from experience how difficult mirrowood furniture was to move. She turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. "Whose prints will open this?"

"Mine and Lillian's, my wife."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

There was a significant pause. Luthor sighed, loud enough it echoed a little in the room. "Go ahead, say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide, or my wife murdered me. There's just no other explanation. I've been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank."

Kara looked elaborately around the room before meeting his eyes.

"Well you must admit that it makes for easier police work. Nice and neat." Kara said. "But you're still here, meaning your stack is still intact, so you must remember what happened."

Luthor hummed. "No, it was completely destroyed I'm afraid. RDed as they say."

"You've got remote storage." Kara deadpanned. "How regular is the update?"

Luthor smiled. "Every forty-eight hours." He tapped the back of his neck. "Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation in Orchid Bay. I don't even have to think about it."

"And they keep your clones on ice there as well."

"Yes. Multiple units."

Guaranteed immortality. Kara paused in her questioning for a while, thinking on it. Wondering how she would like it. Wondering _if _she would like it.

"Must be expensive." She said at last.

"Not really. I own PsychaSec." At Kara's continued silence Luthor continued. "So, you see, Miss Zor-El, neither I nor my wife could have pulled the trigger. We both knew it wouldn't be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn't know about the backup."

Kara nodded. "Alright, who else did know about it? Let's narrow the field."

"Apart from my family?" Luthor shrugged. "My lawyer, a few of her legal aides, and the director at PsychaSec."

"So how did the police explain it?"

"They claimed that suicide is rarely a rational act. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory as well."

"Which were?"

That had been what Luthor wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. "Which were that I should choose to walk the last kilometre home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself."

Kara blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"The police found traces of a cruiser landing on the lawns at the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is in a blind spot for the house security surveillance. A mistake that has now been rectified I assure you. Equally conveniently, there was no satellite cover overhead at that precise time."

"Did they check taxi data stacks?"

Luthor nodded. "For what it's worth they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep a record of their fleets' whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don't. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing." A momentary hunted look crossed Luthor's face. "For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage."

"Have you used these firms in the past?"

"On occasion, yes."

The logical next question hung in the air between them. Kara left it unasked and waited. If Luthor wasn't willing to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, Kara reasoned, then she wasn't going to press him until she had more landmarks locked down.

Luthor cleared his throat. "There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution, the police say, is in keeping with a larger vehicle."

"That depends how hard it landed."

"I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes was in keeping with a kilometre's trek across the lawns. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There's no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing."

"And the police know this too?"

"Of course they do."

"How do they explain it?"

Luthor smiled thinly. "They didn't. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn't see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his own internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As they say, suicide is rarely a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I've had it explained to me. They forget they're wearing a stack, or it doesn't seem important in the moment. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights. I gather the system is similar on Krypton?"

Kara shrugged. "More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offence. Stops murderers passing their work off as suicide."

Luthor stepped towards the blonde and locked gazes with her. "Miss Zor-El, I am three hundred and sixty-five years old. I have lived through a corporate war, the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the Uprising, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in such a fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?"

Kara looked back at him, into those dark hard eyes. "Yes, very."

"Excellent."

Luthor turned then, walking back up the stairs that sat behind the desk at either side. There was a small balcony that separated the ground floor of the longue to its upper level, resting against the large wall-sized window. Seemingly with no other choice, Kara grudgingly followed him. Luthor continued a few more paces and Kara observed the various details. An antique telescope, various maps and charts, all bathed in the burnt orange light of sunset.

As Kara followed him she caught the telescope with her arm, knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope's positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. Kara paused to watch the thing realign itself. The finger marks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.

Luthor had either not noticed her ineptitude or was being polite about it.

"Yours?" Kara asked, pointing loosely to the instrument.

He glanced at it absently. "Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn't remember how that felt." It was said without conscious pretention or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. "Last time I looked through that lens was nearly three centuries ago. A lot of the colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they'd make it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons."

As Luthor looked out to the sunset in what could easily have been mislabelled as reverie, Kara began to mull the situation over. Luthor believed himself above everyone around him. Age certainly might have led to a vast array of knowledge, but in the case of Lionel Luthor it didn't seem to herald wisdom. Quentin Lance's attitude was beginning to make sense to her. If Luthor thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn't likely to make many friends in uniform. When you don't like the laws, you go someplace they can't touch you.

And then you make up some of your own.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Tuesday 14th August." He said promptly. "Going to bed at around midnight."

"That was the last remote update."

"Yes, the neddlecast would have gone through at around four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then."

"So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death."

Optimally bad, Kara thought. Most anything can happen in forty-eight hours. Luthor could have been to the moon and back in that time.

"And there's nothing from before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you?"

Luthor was still looking out the window, but Kara saw how he smiled.

"Did I say something amusing?"

He had the grace to turn back to her.

"No, Miss Zor-El. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that's not a comforting thought. But you must understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me, and yes, some people want me dead. It is the price of success."

Kara scoffed, that was news to her. There were people that hated her on a dozen different worlds, and people who wanted her dead on a dozen more, though she had never considered herself a successful woman.

"Had any interesting ones lately? Death threats, I mean."

He shrugged. "Perhaps, I don't make a habit of screening them. My lawyer and security team handle that for me."

"You don't' consider death threats worth your attention?"

"Miss Zor-El, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that."

"I'll need to see them anyway." The thought of scrolling through hundreds of meters of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of an antique world was sufficient enough to make Kara feel significantly weary, but she couldn't afford to miss anything. A profound lack of interest in Luthor's problems washed through her. Kara masked it with an effort worthy of the approval of J'onn J'onzz.

"I'll have it sorted." Luthor's eyes took on the inward glaze of a someone consulting internal hardware. "Anything else?"

"I need a place to stay back in the city. Somewhere quiet, mid-range."

"Yes, there are plenty of places like that. I'll have Corben ferry you back there." Luthor paused again, summoning yet another minor on his internal microphone if Kara was to hazard a guess. "I take it you intend to interview Lillian now? She really knows more than me about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you'll want to speak to her quite closely."

"Oh yes," Kara said unenthusiastically. "I'd like to do that."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7 **

"You seem ill at ease, Miss Zor-El. Are you?"

Kara looked Lillian Luthor up and down, analysing the woman who stood before her. She couldn't help but to be reminded of Lena, their bodies were about the same age.

"No." Kara said, more coarsely than she had intended.

Lillian curved her mouth down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she'd been studying when Kara had arrived. Behind her, the maid who had shown her in pulled the chart room door shut with a heavy click. Luthor hadn't seen fit to accompany her to the presence of his wife. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as they had headed out of the lounge. Luthor paid her about as much attention as he had the first time. When Kara had left, he had still been standing at the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.

Mrs Luthor deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.

"Well," She said without looking up. "Ask me your questions then."

"Where were you when your husband was killed"?

"I was in bed," She looked up at Kara that time. "Please don't ask me to corroborate that, I was alone."

The chart room was long and airy under and arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. Kara moved out of the centre aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs Luthor and herself. Kara almost felt like she was taking cover.

"Mrs Luthor, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I'm not the police. I'm interested in information, not guilt."

She slid the wrapped map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to her elbow, her wrists adorned with jewellery.

"Do I sound guilty, Miss Zor-El?" She asked.

"You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger."

She laughed. It was a dissonant, throaty sound and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out.

"How very indirect you are."

Kara looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of her. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before she was even born. The names marked on it were in a script she couldn't read.

"Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs Luthor."

"No? Then what is?"

Kara shrugged. "Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties."

"Sounds boring. I think you're going to have a few shocks here, Miss Zor-El."

"I didn't say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs Luthor."

"Oh," She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards Kara. "Yes, Lionel told me a little about you. It seems you're thought of as a dangerous woman on Krypton, and a dozen other planets to that matter."

Kara simply shrugged again, and Mrs Luthor regarded her with a disapproving glare.

"It's Russian."

"I'm sorry?"

"The script." She came around the rack and stood beside Kara, looking down at the map. "This is a Russian computer-generated chart of the moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at an auction. While my husband and daughter might like to obsess over the so-called achievements of aliens I prefer the conquests of humans. Do you like it?"

"It's very nice." Kara commented dismissively. "What time did you go to sleep the night your husband died?"

Mrs Luthor stared at her. "Early. I told you, I was alone." She forced the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. "Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Miss Zor-El, it is not. It's resignation. With a twist of bitterness."

"You feel bitter towards your husband?"

She smiled. "I thought it said resigned."

"You said both."

"Are you saying you think I killed my husband?"

"I don't think anything yet, but it is a possibility."

"Is it?"

"You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives."

Still smiling, she said. "Building a case, are we, Miss Zor-El?"

Kara looked back at her. "If the heart pumps. Yeah."

"The police had a similar theory for a while. They decide the heart didn't pump."

She somehow managed to make it sound as though only a complete moron would have thought as much. Kara could feel her grip on the interview sliding out of sight.

"What made the police…"

"Ask them." She turned her back and walked away from Kara as if making a decision. "How old are you, Miss Zor-El?"

"Subjectively? Thirty. The years on Krypton are a little longer than here, but there isn't much in it."

"And objectively?" She asked, mocking Kara's tone.

"I've had about two centuries in the tank, including my latest stay. You tend to lose track." It was a lie. Kara knew to the day how long each of her terms in storage had been. She had worked it out one particularly lonely night after the fall of the Legion, and the number wouldn't go away.

"How alone you must be by now."

Kara sighed and turned back to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. _Syrtis Minor, 3__rd__ excavation, east quarter_. _Bradbury; aboriginal ruins._ Kara started to tug one of the rolls free.

"Mrs Luthor, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?"

She whirled on Kara almost before she had finished speaking, and her face was tight with anger.

"My husband did not kill himself." She said freezingly.

"You seem very sure of that." Kara looked up from the map and gave her a smug smile. "For someone who wasn't awake, I mean."

"Put that back," She cried, staring back towards Kara. "You have no idea how valuable…"

She stopped, brought up short as Kara slid the map back into the tack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.

"Are you trying to make me angry, Miss Zor-El?"

"I'm just trying to get your attention."

They looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs Luthor lowered her gaze.

"I've told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?"

"Where had your husband gone that night?"

She bit her lip. "I'm not sure. He went to Osaka for a meeting that day, for a meeting."

"Osaka is where?"

She looked at Kara in surprise.

"I'm not from here." Kara said impatiently.

"Osaka is in Japan. I thought…"

"Yeah. Krypton was settled by Japanese and European colony ships. It was a long time ago, and I wasn't around."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You probably don't know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.

Kara stopped. Mrs Luthor was looking at her strangely. Her own words caught up to her a moment later. Download dues. Kara knew she was going to have to sleep soon, before she said or did something stupid.

"I am over three centuries old, Miss Zor-El." There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She'd taken back the advantage as smoothly as any politician or negotiator that Kara had ever seen. "Appearances are deceptive, as I'm sure you know. This is my eleventh body."

The way that she held herself said that Kara was supposed to take a look. She flicked her gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half-shrouded lines of her thighs, all the while affecting a detachment that was clearly wasn't the reaction Lillian Luthor had been hoping for.

"It's very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I'm not from here. Can we get back to your husband please? He'd been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. Where did he could after that?"

"I don't know, I'm not his keeper, Miss Zor-El."

Kara could tell her interview was going nowhere fast.

"Perhaps I'd better speak to him about it." Kara looked around the room. "All these maps, how long have you been collecting?"

Mrs Luthor must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, Kara could practically see the tension puddle out of her like oil.

"Most of my life. While Lionel was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground."

Kara thought of the telescope abandoned on Luthor's sundeck. She saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and observations past and a relic no one wanted. Kara remembered the way it had wheezed itself back into alignment after she jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Kara had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.

_Old._

With a sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around her, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. Kara even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young woman in front of her and her throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in her wanted to run, to get out and breath fresh, new air, to be away from those creatures whose memory stretched back beyond even historical events she had been taught in school.

"Are you alright, Miss Zor-El?"

Download dues.

Kara focused with an effort. "Yes, I'm fine." Kara cleared her throat and looked into her eyes. "Well, I won't keep you any longer, Mrs Luthor. Thank you for your time. I'll see myself out."

The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and Kara's footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside her skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that she passed she felt those ancient eyes on her spine, watching.

Kara muttered to herself.

"I really need a cigarette."


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

The sky had turned the texture of old silver and the lights were clicking to life all across Starling City by the time the Luthor's chauffer had returned Kara to the town. The car spiralled down from the Aerium over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more reasonable speed. Corben, the chauffer, was a muscular middle-aged man, whose sharply defined looks lent themselves well to brooding. He had mostly refused to speak to Kara during the journey, seeming to hold some vague, unfounded grude that she couldn't quite place.

She didn't complain. Kara's own mood wasn't far off matching the chauffeur's. Images of Jimmy's death kept creeping into her mind. It had only happened last night. Subjectively.

The transport braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above them to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine's comset. Corben cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously thought the roof window. They settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. Kara started to take an interest in what was outside.

There was, Kara noted, a sameness to street life. On every world she'd ever been to, the same underlying patterns played out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essense of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine had been dropped on it from above. Starling City, Earth, the most ancient of the civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they had probably been doing since there had been cars for them to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound – and broadcast – proofed, but Kara could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Legion, they reversed humanity. The sameness becomes apparent first, the underlying resonance that lets one get a handle on where they are, then the difference can be built up from the details.

The ethnic mix on Krypton had been primary European and Japanese, although any tank-grown variant was available…for a price. On Earth, every face was a different cast and colour – Kara saw tall, angular boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a man who looked like Mon-El, but she had lost him in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy.

The impression skipped and flickered across her thoughts like the man in the crowd. Kara frowned and caught at it.

On Krypton, street life had a stripped back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that felt almost like it had been choreograph if one wasn't used to it. Kara had grown up in it, so the effect hardly registered until it wasn't there anymore.

Kara wasn't seeing it on Earth. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo's windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get around tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn't noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice Kara saw the making of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant.

Despite all that, Kara could feel something else. Gnawing away at the edge of her senses. A danger that she couldn't place, the feeling of a set of eyes that she couldn't see watching her.

"Corben," Kara glanced sideways at his impassive profile. "You wanna cut the broadcast block for a minute?"

He looked across at Kara with a slight curl of the lip. "Sure."

Kara settled back in the seat and fixed her gaze on the street again. "I'm not a tourist, Corben. This is what I do."

The street sellers' catalogue flooded aboard the limo like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as the limo glided along, but still a sensory overload y any Kryptonians standard. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore's name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial; coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to Kara. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. Kara caught a couple of religious broadcasts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were liked drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make more sense.

"What does from the Houses mean?" Kara asked Corben, picking up on the phrase from the broadcasts.

Corben sneered. "The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl's from the Houses, she's been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about." He nodded at the street. "Don't kid yourself, no one out there ever worked at the Houses."

Kara hummed in response, picking up yet another ad for the experience of the Houses. "You can turn the screen off now."

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of Kara's head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. She waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

"This is Mission Street," Corben announced. "The next few blocks are all hotels. Want me to drop you here?"

"You recommend anywhere?"

"Depends what you want."

Kara gave him one of his own shrugs back. "Light. Space. Room service."

He squinted thoughtfully. "Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean."

The limousine picked up speed fractionally and they travelled a few more blocks in silence. Kara neglected to explain that she hadn't meant _that_ kind of room service, but she let Corben draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Lena Luthor's sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through her mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style Kara didn't recognise. She climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it look old. Kara thanked Corben, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment Kara lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. She turned away from the mirrored glass doors of The Hendrix, and pushed on down the street.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

Kara had turned on her heel and walked further down the street after Corben and the limo had disappeared from her sight. Luthor was paying for all her expenses, so Kara had no doubt that he would be regularly checking up on exactly where she was spending his money during the investigation but there was something off-putting about Corben. Kara wasn't sure she wanted him knowing where she was sleeping.

She settled in front of a hotel that stood out strongly from the rest, the subtle lighting and design catching her attention. The front of the building was comprised mostly of tinted grey windows, and a crisscrossing pattern of neon lighting. Kara stepped towards the doors and they parted slightly jerkily to let her in.

If the lobby was anything to go by, the Waverider was certainly going to satisfy the second of Kara's requirements. Corben could have parked three or four of Luthor's limos side by side in it and still had the space to wheel around a cleaning robot. Kara wasn't so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum piping and tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling the gloom into the centre of the room. The street Kara had just stepped off was the brightest source of light in the room.

The lobby was deserted, but there as a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. Kara picked her way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish, and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

Kara looked around and back at the screen.

No one.

She cleared her throat.

The characters blurred and shifted:

SELECT LANGUAGE.

"I'm looking for a room." Kara tried in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen jumped to life so dramatically that Kara took a step backwards. From whirling, multicoloured fragments it rapidly assembled into a holo-projected tanned Asian face above a dark suit and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and Kara was facing a brunette thirty-year-old woman in a black tank top. Having generated Kara's interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that she couldn't speak Japanese after all.

"Good evening, miss. Welcome to the Waverider, Star City's premier lodging experience, established 2087. How may I assist you?"

Kara repeated her request, following the move into English.

"Thank you. I can provide a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city's information and entertainment stack. Perhaps you could indicate your preference for floor and size."

"I'd like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you've got." The AI stepped back, held its hands out and projected a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel's room structure. A selector pulsed efficiently through the room and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine print data shuttered down beside the image.

"The Parlour suite, three rooms dormitory thirteen point eight seven meters by—"

"That's fine, I'll take it."

The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjuror's trick and the woman stepped back to the desk.

"How many nights will you be staying?"

"Indefinite."

"A deposit is required," Said the hotel diffidently. "For stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars UN should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded."

"Fine."

"Thank you," From the tone of voice, Kara began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Waverider. "How will you be paying?"

"DNA trace, Bank of the Nation."

On the screen built into the desk, the payment details were scrolling out when Kara felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of her skull.

"That's exactly what you think it is," Said a calm voice. "You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your stack out of that wall for weeks. I'm talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body."

Kara complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up her spine to the point where the gun muzzle was touching. It was a while since she had been threatened with real death.

"Pardon me, but we were in middle of a conversation." The hotel spoke impassively as a slim, black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring scanner over Kara from head to foot.

"Shut up you piece of digibrain shit. My microwave is smarter than you." The gun at her neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. Her flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

"She's clean." Another crisp, professional voice. "Basic neurachem, but it's inoperative. No hardware."

"Really? Travelling kind of light, aren't you, Zor-El?"

Kara's heart dropped out of her chest and landed soggily in her guts. She had hoped it was just local crime.

"I don't know you," She said cautiously, turning her head a couple of millimetres. The gun jabbed and she stopped.

"That's right, you don't. Now, here's what's going to happen. We're going to walk outside—"

"Credit access will cease in sixty seconds," Said the hotel patiently. "Please key in your DNA signature now."

"You must be some kind of moron, staying in an AI hotel. Possessive, like a crazy girlfriend. No one stays in them anymore." The man behind her spoke, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Come on, Zor-El, we're going to take a ride."

"I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment." Said the woman behind the desk.

Something in the tone of that phrase stopped Kara as she was turning, and on impulse, she forced out a sudden racking cough.

"What—"

Bending forward with the force of the cough, Kara raised a hand to her mouth and licked her thumb.

"The fuck are you playing at, Zor-El?"

Kara straightened again and snapped her hand out to the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of her skull and Kara collapsed to her hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into her face and she went the rest of the way down.

"Thank you, miss," Kara heard the voice of the hotel through the roaring in her head. "Your account is being processed."

Kara tried to get up and got a second boot in her ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from her nose onto the grey floor. The barrel of the gun ground into her neck.

"That wasn't smart, Zor-El," The voice was marginally less calm. "If you think the cops are going to trace us where you're going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up!"

He was pulling her to her feet when the thunder cut loose.

Why someone had seen fit to equip the Waverider's security systems with twenty millimetre automatic cannons was beyond Kara, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye, Kara glimpsed the twin auto turrets come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channelled a three second burst of fire through her primary assailant. Enough fire-power to take down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.

The masked woman ran for the doors, along with a handful of other, similarly clad mercenaries, and with the echoes of the fire still hammering in her ears, Kara saw the turrets swivel to follow. The turrets tore through the goons one at a time. The woman in the mask made it the furthest, only a dozen paces through the gloom before a prism of ruby laser light dappled across her back and a fresh fuselage exploded in the confines of the lobby. Kara clapped both hands over her ears, still on her knees, and the shells punched through the woman. She went over in a graceless tangle of limbs.

The firing stopped.

In the cordite reeking quiet that followed, nothing moved. The auto turrets had gone dormant, barrels slanting at a downward angle, smoke coiling from the breeches. Kara unclasped her hands from her ears and climbed to her feet, pressing gingerly on her nose and face to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down and though there were cuts in her mouth she couldn't find any loosened teeth. Her ribs hurt where the second kick had hit her, but it didn't feel as if anything was broken. Kara glanced at the nearest corpse, and wished she hadn't. Someone was going to have to get a mop.

To her left, an elevator door opened with a faint chime.

"Your room is ready." Said the hotel. "If you would like to freshen up before the authorities arrive."


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

Quentin Lance was remarkably restrained.

He came through the hotel doors with a loping stride that bounced one heavily weighted jacket pocket against his thigh, came to a halt in the centre of the lobby and surveyed the carnage with his tongue thrust into one cheek.

"You do this sort of thing a lot, Zor-El?"

"I've been waiting a while," Kara told him mildly. "I'm not in a great mood."

The hotel had placed the call to the Star City police about the time the auto turret had cut loose, but it was a good half hour before the first cruisers came spiralling down out of the sky traffic. Kara hadn't bothered to go to her room, since she knew that they were going to drag her out of bed anyway, and once they had arrived there was no question of her going anywhere until Lance got there. A police medic gave her a cursory check, ascertained that she wasn't suffering from a concussion and left her with a retardant spray to stop the nose bleed. After which, Kara sat down in the lobby and sated her new sleeve's nicotine itch with a packet of cigarettes provided by the hotel. She was still sat there an hour later when the detective arrived.

Lance gestured. "Yeah, well. Busy city at night."

Kara offered him the packet. He looked at it as if she had just posed some major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the packet, he searched his pockets, produced a heavy petrol lighter and snapped it open. He seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around them, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.

"So," He plumed smoke into the air above his head. "You know these guys?"

"Oh, give me a fucking break!"

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, I've been out of storage six hours, if that." Kara could hear her voice starting to rise. "Meaning, I've talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I've never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions or am I going to bed?"

"All right, keep your skull on." Lance looked suddenly tired. He sank into the lounger opposite Kara. "You told the unis' they were professionals?"

"They were." Kara decided it was the one piece of information she might as well share with the police, since they'd probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the five corpses through their files.

"Did they call you by name?"

Kara furrowed her brow with great care. "By name?"

"Yeah," He made an impatient gesture. "Did they call you Zor-El, or Kara, or whatever?"

"I don't think so."

"Any other names?"

Kara raised an eyebrow. "Such as?"

The weariness that had clouded his face retreated abruptly, and he gave Kara a hard look. "Forget it. We'll run the hotel's memory, and see."

_Oops._

"On Krypton you'd have to get a warrant for that." Kara made it come out lazily.

"We do here." Lance knocked ash off his cigarette onto a table top. "But it won't be a problem. Apparently, this isn't the first time the Waverider had been up on an organic damage charge. While ago but the archives go back."

"So, how come it wasn't decommissioned?"

"I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self-defence. Course," Lance nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep. "We're talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this."

"Yeah I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?"

"What do you think I am, a search construct?" Lance had started watching Kara with a speculative hostility that she didn't much like. Then, abruptly, he shrugged. "Archive precis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under right after with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Waverider graded to artificial intelligence and bought itself out."

"Smart."

"Yeah, from what I hear the AIs were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are AI." He grinned at her through the smoke. "That's why no one stays in them. I read somewhere they're hardwired to want customers the same way people want sex. That's got to be frustrating, right?"

"Right."

One of the cops moved and hovered over them. Lance glanced up at him with a look that said he didn't want to be disturbed.

"Four of them are just local muscle but we've got one registered to Anatoly Knyazev."

Lance started. "Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Zor-El. He waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse that lay in front of the check-in desk. "Sleeve last registered to Anatoly Knyazev, otherwise known as the KGBeast. Professional assassin out of Vladivostok."

Lance glanced at the other cop. "Ulan Bator registry?"

"Got it in one."

"Got the motherfucker." Lance bounced to his feet with renewed energy. "Let's get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Knyazev downloaded into Holding before midnight." He looked back at Kara. "Looks like you may just have proved useful.

The other cop reached under his double breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together he and Lance went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet, cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, Kara got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to her.

It was not what one would call refined biotech surgery. The cop had chopped out a section of the corpse's spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and then moved onto digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Lance was holding the head steady in both hands.

"They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to," Lance said. "See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out, that's where it'll be."

"I'm trying," Grunted the cop. "Some augmentation in here, I think. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over… Shit! Thought I had it there."

"No, Hilton, you're working at the wrong angle. Let me try." Lance took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

"Shit, I nearly had it."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm not spending all night watching you poke around in there." He glanced up and saw Kara watching, nodded a brief acknowledgment and put the serrated point of the place in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, he chopped something loose. He looked up at Hilton with a grin.

"Hear that?"

He reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn't look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the micro-jacks protruding stiffly from one end. Kara could see how Catholics might not want to believe that it was the receptacle of the human soul.

"Gotcha, Knyazev." Lance held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to Hilton. He wiped his fingers on the corpse's clothing. "Right, let's get the other's cleaned up."

As the cops went and returned to the standard procedure Kara tipped her head close enough to Lance to mutter.

"So what's the big deal about getting this guy on stack?"

Lance jerked around to look at her, whether out of surprise or dislike of her proximity Kara couldn't be sure. "Knyazev isn't a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Knyazev moves in, the only person you can trust is you. So, he makes an illegal copy of himself, and downloads it into a black market sleeve."

"Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?"

Lance grimaced. "Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it's going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase." He shrugged. "Price of progress."

"About the only way you can get it done on Krypton is to file for a stellar range 'cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy's offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of money, though. You've got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it."

"It's easier here." Lance said shortly.

"Yeah? How's it work?"

"It—" He hesitated, as if trying to work out why it was he was talking to her. "Why do you want to know?"

Kara grinned at him. "Just naturally nosy, I guess."

_XXX_

"OK, Zor-El," He cupped both hands around his coffee mug. "Works like this. One day Mr Anatoly Knyazev walks into one of the big retrieval and re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyds or Cartwright Solar, maybe."

"Is that here?" Kara gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of her room. "In Star City?"

Hilton had given Lance some odd looks when he stayed behind as the police departed the Waverider. Lance saw him off with another admonition to get Knyazev downloaded rapid, and then they retreated upstairs. He barely watched the cruisers leave.

"Star City, West Coast, maybe even Europe." Lance sipped his coffee, wincing at the overload of whisky he'd asked the hotel to dump in it. "Doesn't matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who's been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr Knyazev wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It's the long con, with the one difference that what we're after here is more than money."

Kara leaned back against her side of the window frame. All three rooms of the Parlour suite looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westwards, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion mats. Lance and Kara were seated opposite each other with a clean meter of space between them.

"OK, so that's one copy, then what?"

Lance shrugged. "Fatal accident."

"In Ulan Bator?"

"Right. Knyazev runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyds with their retrieval writ, freight Anatoly Knyazev (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you."

"Meanwhile…"

"Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who's not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent wipes the sleeve's mind, downloads Knyazev's copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Star City."

"You don't catch these guys too often?"

"Almost never. Point is, you've got to catch both copies cold, either dead or held on a UN indictable offence. We've got number one back at Fell Street, sooner or later the other one will show up. But in a no-win situation the twin will blow its own cortical stack out before we can make the bust. I've seen it happen."

"That's pretty severe. What's the penalty for all this?"

"Erasure."

"_Erasure? _You do that here?"

Lance nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing around his mouth, but never quite on it. "Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?"

Kara thought about it. Some crimes in The Corps had carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but she had never seen it applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Krypton erasure had been abolished a decade before she was born.

"It's kind of old-fashioned, isn't it?"

"You feel bad about what's going to happen to old Knyazev?"

Kara ran the tip of her tongue over the cuts inside her mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at her neck and shook her head. "No. but does it stop people like him?"

"There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage." The look on Lance's face said that he didn't think that was such a great idea.

Kara put her coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and she was too tired to stop them. Lance waved away the offered pack. Touching her own cigarette to the pack's ignition patch, she squinted at him.

"How old are you, Lance?"

He looked at her narrowly. "Fifty-four. Why?"

"Never been d.h.'d, hmm?"

"Yeah. I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I'm not a criminal, and I don't have the money for that kind of travel."

Kara let out the first breath of smoke. "Kind of touchy about it, aren't you?"

"Like I said, I'm not a criminal."

"No." Kara thought back Jimmy. "If you were, you wouldn't think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy rap."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." Kara didn't know what had led her to forget that Lance was the law, but something had. Something existed in the space between them, a kind of familiar charge, something Kara might have been able to work out if her Legionary intuitions hadn't been blunted by her new sleeve. Whatever it was, it walked out of the room with that realisation. Kara drew her shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. She needed sleep.

"Knyazev's expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he's got to cost."

"About twenty grand a hit."

"Then Luthor didn't commit suicide."

Lance raised an eyebrow. "Fast work, for someone who just got here."

"Oh, come on." Kara exploded a lungful of smoke at him. "If it was suicide, who the fuck paid the twenty to have me hit?"

"Because there's no one else who would want to have an asshole like you killed."

Kara leaned forward. "Sure, I'm disliked in a lot of places, a few centuries ago, and not by anyone with those kinds of connections or that kind of money. I'm not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Knyazev onto me knows I'm working for Luthor."

Lance grinned. "Thought they didn't call you by name?"

_Tired, Kara._

She could almost see J'onn J'onzz wagging his finger at her. Members of The Legion didn't get taken apart by local law.

She stumbled on as best she could.

"They knew who I was. Men like Knyazev don't hang around hotels waiting to rip off tourists. Lance, come on."

He let her exasperation sink into the silence before he answered. "So, maybe Luthor was hit as well, so what?"

"So, you've got to reopen the inquiry."

"You don't listen, Zor-El." He bent her a smile meant for stopping armed crooks. "The case is closed."

Kara sagged back against the wall and watched him through the smoke for a while. Finally, she said. "You know, when your clean-up squad arrived tonight one of them showed me his badge for long enough for me to actually see it. Quite fancy, close up. That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it."

He made a get-on-with-it gesture, and Kara took another pull on the cigarette before she sank the barb in.

"To protect and serve? I guess by the time you make detective, you don't really believe that stuff anymore."

Contact. A muscle jumped under one eye and his cheeks pulled in as if he was sucking on something bitter. He stared at her, and for that moment Kara thought she might have pushed too far. Then his shoulders slumped, and he sighed.

"Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway. Luthor isn't people like you and me. He's a fucking Meth."

"Is that a crime, detective?"

"It should be," Said Lance grimly. "You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you're God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well they don't really matter anymore. You've seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you're standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you'll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet."

Kara looked seriously at him. "You pin anything like that on Luthor? Ever?"

"I'm not talking about Luthor," He waved the objection aside impatiently. "I'm talking about his kind. They're like the AIs. They're a breed apart. They're not human, they deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well when you're dealing with the Star City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes back up on you."

Kara thought briefly on her time spent in New Beijing, working for Chein Na Wai. She remembered the way China White had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to her in dreams for a long time afterwards. White's argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really died any more, punishment can only come through suffering. With those excesses in mind, she wondered how far off the mark Lance really was.

On Krypton, most people could afford to be re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

"So, Luthor get's short-changed because he's a Meth. Sorry Lionel, you're an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Star City police has got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing."

But Lance wasn't rising to the bait anymore. He sipped his coffee and made a dismissive gesture. "Look, Zor-El. Luthor is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he's got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don't have time to chase Luthor's phantoms."

"And if they're not phantoms?"

Lance sighed. "Zor-El, I went over that house myself three times with the forensic team. There's no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defences, and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net's records. Lillian Luthor volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraph test there is, and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband. No one broke in and killed her husband. Lionel Luthor killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that's all there is to it. I'm sorry you're supposed to prove otherwise but wishing isn't going to make it fucking so. It's an open-and-shut case."

"And the phone call? The fact that Luthor wasn't exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I'm important enough to send Knyazev out here?"

"I'm not going to argue the toss with you on this, Zor-El. We'll interrogate Knyazev and find out what he knows, but for the rest I've been over the ground before and it's staring to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Luthor does. Real death victims who weren't lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away." There was a hooded tiredness in Lance's eyes as he ticked the list off on his fingers. "Organic damage cases who don't have the money to get re-sleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I'm sorry, I just don't have the sympathy to spare for Mr Lionel Luthor with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under."

"That happens often, does it?"

"Often enough, but don't look surprised." He gave Kara a bleak smile. "He's a fucking Meth. They're all the same."

It was a side of him Kara didn't like, and argument she didn't want to have and a view of Luthor she didn't need. And underneath it all, her nerves were screaming for sleep.

Kara stubbed out her cigarette.

"I think you'd better go, detective. All this prejudice is giving me a headache."

Something flickered in his eyes, something Kara couldn't read at all. There for a second and then gone. He shrugged, out down the coffee mug and swung his legs over the side of the shelf. He stretched himself upright, arched his spine until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. Kara stayed where she was, watching his reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the door, he stopped and Kara saw him turn his head.

"Hey, Zor-El?"

Kara looked over at him. "Forget something?"

He nodded his head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game they'd been playing.

"You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Knyazev, so I guess I owe you that."

"You don't owe me a thing, Lance. The hotel did it, not me."

"Leila Begin," He said. "Run that by Luthor's fancy lawyers, see where it gets you."

The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. Kara stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it down to its filter.

Luthor had not committed suicide, that much was clear. Kara had been on the case less than a day and already she'd had two separate lobbies land on her back. First, Quentin Lance's at the justice facility, then the Vladivostok hitman. Not to mention Lillian Luthor's off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for it to be what it purported to be. Lance wanted something, whoever had paid Anatoly Knyazev wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Luthor case to remain closed.

That wasn't an option Kara had.

"Your guest has left that building," Said the hotel, the woman fizzling into existence across the room, jolting Kara out of her glazed retrospection.

"Thanks," She said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. "Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?"

"Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?"

"No." Kara yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. "Just don't let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours."

Abruptly it was all Kara could do to get out of her clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed her. She left Luthor's summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to her body weight and size, then bore her up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

She made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Lena Luthor's curves, but she kept seeing Jimmy's body being torn apart by Kalashnikov fire instead.

And sleep dragged her under.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

_There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street._

_Argoargoargoargo…_

_I know this place._

_I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this place has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I'm moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn't helping matters._

_Alex Danvers steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I'm not really surprised to see her here, but her ruined face still gives me a jolt. She grins with what's left of her features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch._

"_Leila Begin," She says, and nods back to where I have come from. "Run that by Luthor's fancy lawyer."_

"_I_ _will," I say, moving past her. But her hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean her arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing her, but she's still there at my shoulder. I start moving again._

"_Going to turn and fight?" She asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing._

"_With what?" I say, opening my empty hands._

"_Should have armed yourself. Big time."_

"_J'onn told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons."_

_Alex Danvers snorts derisively. "Yeah, and look where he ended up. Blown to pieces by an orbital." _

"_You can't know that," I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. "You died before that happened." _

"_Oh, come on, who really dies these days?"_

"_Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die Alex. I blew your stack myself." _

"_What's a Catholic?" _

"_Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?" _

"_Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?" _

_I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Alex has got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course…_

_She should know. Her own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Argo when she dug the eyeball out with her fingers. I never found out what she was hallucinating at the time. By the time I got to Alex the virus had scrambled her mind beyond retrieval. I'd put a particle baster against her stack and disintegrated it to put her out of her misery. _

"_I've got to do something about this." I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm._

"_Smell that?" Alex asks, lifting her own face to the chilly air around us. "They're changing it."_

"_What?" But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Waverider, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only…_

"_Got to go." Says Alex, and I'm about to ask her where when I realise she means me and I'm…_

Awake.

Kara's eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waiflike figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. Kara frowned, and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on her forearm. No blood. With the realisation, she came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of the incense that had originally nudged her towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Waverider's olfactory wakeup call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.

"You have a visitor!" The voice of the hotel chirped, and Kara's eyes snapped across to where the holographic construct lingered just inside of the doorway.

"What time is it?" She croaked. The back of her throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.

"Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes."

"And my visitor?"

"Dinah Drake," Said the hotel. "Do you require breakfast?"

Kara got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. "Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Drake up."

By the time the door chimed at her, Kara was out of the shower and padding around in a iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. She collected her breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while she opened the door.

Dinah Drake was a tall, impressive-looking Caucasian woman, topping Kara's sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair swept back and brushing over her shoulders. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat, turned up at the collar, and looked at Kara with a look she couldn't place.

There was something familiar about her, but Kara waved it away.

"Miss Zor-El?"

"Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?" Kara laid the tray on the unmade bed.

"No, thank you. Miss Zor-El, I am Lionel Luthor's principal legal representative via the firm on Drake and Hernandez. Mr Luthor informed me—"

"Yes, I know." Kara picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.

"The point is, Miss Zor-El, we have an appointment with Cisco Ramon at PsychaSec in…" Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. "Thirty minutes."

"I see," Kara said, shewing slowly. "I didn't know that.

"I've been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn't realise you would sleep so late."

Kara grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. "Faulty research then. I was only sleeved yesterday."

She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.

"We'll be late then," She said. "I guess you need breakfast."

_XXX_

It was cold in the middle of the bay.

Kara climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of grey cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. Kara turned up the collar of her summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to about mid-thigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff her hands in.

Beside her, Drake was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb and they both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over Kara's hands and face. She blinked her eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Drake raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Drake turned to the building behind them and gestured with one laconic thumb.

"This way."

Kara pushed her hands into the inadequate pockets of her suit and followed her lead. Bent slightly into the wind, they picked their way up the long, winding steps to PsychaSec, Starling.

She'd expected a high-security installation, and she wasn't disappointed. PsychaSec was laid out in a series of long, low double-storey modules with deeply recessed windows reminiscent of a military command bunker. The only break in that pattern was a single dome at the western end, which she guessed contained the satellite uplink gear. The whole complex was a pale granite grey and the windows a smoky reflective orange. There was no holodisplay, or broadcast publicity, in fact nothing to announce they'd got the right place except a sober plaque laser-engraved into the sloping stone wall of the entrance block.

_**PsychaSec **_

_D.H.F. Retrieval and Secure Holding Clonic Re-sleeving_

Above the plaque was a small black sentry eye flanked by heavily grilled speakers. Dinah Drake raised her arm and waved at it.

"Welcome to PsychaSec," Said a construct voice briskly. "Please identify yourself within the fifteen-second security time limit."

"Dinah Drake and Kara Zor-El to see Director Ramon. We have an appointment."

A thin, green scanning laser flickered over them both from head to foot and then a section of the wall hinged smoothly back and down forming a passage inside. Glad to get out of the wind, Kara stepped nimbly into the niche and followed orange runway lights down a short corridor into a reception area, leaving Drake to bring up the rear. As soon as they stepped off the walkway and into reception, the massive door slab rumbled upright and closed again. Solid security.

Reception was a circular, warmly lit area with banks of seats and low tables set at the cardinal compass points. There were small groups of people seated north and east, conversing in low tones. In the centre was a circular desk where a receptionist say behind a battery of secretarial equipment. No artificial constructs there, it was a real human being, a slim young man barely out of his teens who looked up with intelligent eyes as they approached.

"You can go right through, Miss Drake. The Director's office is up the stairs and third door on your right.

"Thank you," Drake took the lead again, turning back briefly as soon as they were out of earshot of the receptionist. "Ramon's a bit impressed with himself since this place was built, but he's basically a good person. Try not to let him irritate you."

"Sure."

They followed the receptionists instructions until, outside the aforementioned door Kara had to stop and supress a snigger. Ramon's door, no doubt in the best possible Earth taste, was pure mirrorwood from top to bottom. After the high profile security system and flesh and blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the nude advertisers at Madame Mi's Wharfwhore Warehouse. Kara's amusement must have been evident because Drake gave her a frown as she knocked on the door.

"Come."

Sleep had done wonders for the interface between Kara's mind and her new sleeve. Composing her rented features, she followed Drake into the room.

Ramon was at his desk, ostensibly working at a grey and green coloured holodisplay. He was a thin man, whose long, thick hair sat in stark contrast to his expensively cut black suit. His expression was slightly resentful. He'd not been happy when Drake had called him from the cab to inform him that they would be delayed, but Luthor had obviously been in touch with him because he'd accepted the later appointment with the stuff acquiescence of a disciplined child.

"Since you have requested a viewing of our facilities here, Miss Zor-El, shall we start? I have cleared my agenda for the next couple of hours, but I do have clients waiting."

Something about Ramon's manner brough Warden Singh to mind, but it was an altogether smoother, less embittered Singh. Kara glanced over Ramon's suit and face. Perhaps if Singh had made his career in storage for the super-rich instead of the criminal elements he might have turned out like Ramon.

"Fine."

It got pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most d.h.f depots, wasn't much more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. They tramped through basement rooms cooled to the 7 to 11 degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of big thirty-centimetre expanded format discs and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls.

"It's a duplex system," Said Ramon proudly. "Every client is stored on two separate discs in different parts of the building, only the central processor can find them both and there's a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access to both copies. To do any real damage you'd have to break in and get past all the security systems twice."

Kara made polite noises.

"Our satellite uplink operates through a secure network of no les than eighteen secure clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence," Ramon was getting carried away with his own sales pitched. He seemed to have forgotten that Drake nor Kara were in the market for PsychaSec's services. "No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission route."

Strictly speaking, that wasn't true. Given an artificial intelligence of sufficient size and inclination, you'd get it right sooner or later, but that was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used AIs to get at you didn't need to finish out off with a particle blaster to the head. Kara was looking in the wrong place.

"Can I get access to Luthor's clones?" She asked Drake abruptly.

"From a legal point of view?" Drake shrugged. "Mr Luthor's instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know."

Carte blanche? Drake had been throwing those terms at Kara all morning. The words almost had the taste of heavy parchment. It was like something an An-Dor character would say in a Settlement years flic.

_Well, you're on Earth now_.

Kara turned to Ramon, who nodded grudgingly.

"There are some procedures." He said.

They went back up to ground level, along the corridors that forcibly reminded her of the re-sleeving facility at Iron Heights by their very dissimilarity. No rubber gurney wheel tracks there - the sleeve transporters would be air cushion vehicles – and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed in Gaudí-style waves on the inside. At one corner they passed a woman cleaning them by hand. Kara raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.

Ramon caught the look. "There are some jobs that robot labour just never gets quite right."

"I'm sure."

The clone banks appeared on their left, heavy, sealed doors in bevelled and sculpted steel counterposing the ornate windows. They stopped at one and Ramon peered into the retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outwards, fully a metre thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four metre long chamber with a similar door at the far end. They stepped inside, and the outer door swing shut with a soft thud that pushed the air into Kara's ears.

"This is an airtight chamber," Said Ramon redundantly. "We will receive a sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No need to be alarmed."

A light in the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust off was in progress and then the second door opened with no more sound than the first. They walked out into the Luthor family vault.

Kara had seen that sort of thing before.

Chein Na Wai had maintained a small one for her transit clones on New Beijing and of course The Corps had them in abundance. Still, she'd never seen anything quite like that.

The space was oval, dome-ceilinged, and must have extended through both storeys of the installation. It was huge, the size of a temple back on Krypton. Lighting was low, a drowsy orange, and the temperature was blood-warm. The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods of the same orange as the light, suspended from the ceiling by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, foetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; towards the of the dome Kara could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cultured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analogue of womb wining, and they would grow with the foetus within to become like the metre and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault. The whole crop hung there like an insane mobile, just waiting for some huge sickly breeze to stir it into motion.

Ramon cleared his throat, and both Drake and Kara shook off the paralysed wonder that had gripped them on the threshold.

"This may look haphazard," He said. "But the spacing is computer generated."

"I know," Kara nodded and went closer to one of the lower sacs. "It's fractal-derived, right?"

"Ah, yes," Ramon seemed almost to resent her knowledge.

Kara peered in at the clone. Centimetres away from her face Lena Luthor's features dreamed in amniotic fluid beneath the membrane. Her arms were folded protectively over her breasts and her hands were folded lightly into fists under her chin. Her hair had been gathered into a thick, coiled snake on the top of her head and covered in some kind of web.

"The whole family's here," Drake murmured at her shoulder. "Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most only have one or two clones but Luthor and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?"

"Yeah."

Despite herself, Kara had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Lena Luthor's face. It was warm, and gave slightly under her hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed though to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give into such penetrations and heal afterward.

Kara turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Ramon.

"This is all very nice, but presumably you don't shell one of these whenever Luthor comes in here. You must have tanks as well."

"This way," Ramon gestured for them to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of their passage and Kara had to duck to avoid brushing into one. Ramon's fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door and they went through into a long, low room whose clinic illumination was almost blinding after the womb light in the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one Kara had woken up in the previous day were ranked along one wall, but where her birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.

"Full life support suspension chambers," Said Ramon. "Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma free. Any clinic work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination."

Kara caught the exasperated rolling of Dinah Drake's eyes on the periphery of her vision and a grin twitched at the corner of her mouth.

"Who has access to this chamber?"

"Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course."

Kara wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine each one. There was a Lena clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi's at seven and eight.

"You've got the daughter on ice twice?"

"Yes," Ramon looked puzzled, then slightly superior. That was his chance to get back the initiative he'd lost on the fractal patterning. "Have you not been informed of her current condition?"

"Yeah, she's in psychosurgery." Kara growled. "That doesn't explain why there's two of her here."

"Well," Ramon darted a glance at Drake, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.

"PsychaSec have instructions from Mr Luthor to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Miss Luthor is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here."

"The Luthor's like to alternate their sleeves," Said Ramon knowledgably. "Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of some quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonable of course."

"I'm sure it is," Kara turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. "Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?"

There was a brief silence, during which Drake looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and bit her lip as if to subdue a smirk. Ramon's lips lightened to almost anal proportions.

"I consider that remark to be in very poor taste," The director said finally. "Do you have any more important questions, Miss Zor-El?"

Kara paused next to Lena Luthor's cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.

"Just on question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?"

Ramon glanced across at Drake as if to enlist legal support for his words. "I am directly authorised by Mr Luthor to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically requested not to. He made no such request on this occasion."

There was something there, scratching at the Legionnaire antenna; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. Kara looked around the room.

"This place is entry monitored, right?"

"Naturally." Ramon's tone was still chilly.

"Was there much activity the day Luthor went to Osaka?"

"No more than usual, Miss Zor-El, the police have already been through these records. I really don't see the value—"

"Indulge me." Kara suggested, not looking at him, and the Legionnaire cadences in her voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

_XXX_

Two hours later, Kara was staring out the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the PsychaSec landing quay and climbed over Orchid Bay.

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

Kara glanced at Dinah Drake, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off her. Kara thought she had gotten most of the external giveaways on her sleeve locked down, but she had heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses' states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn't have surprised her if Dinah Drake had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful head.

The entry data for the Luthor vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as a Chapel of Rao on a Sunday afternoon. Luthor entered with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping from the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words were exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.

Kara shrugged. "I don't know. I don't really know what I'm looking for yet."

Drake yawned. "Total Absorb, huh?"

"Yeah, that's right." Kara looked at her more closely. "You know much about the Legion?"

"A bit. I did my articles in UN litigation, and after the Uprising, you guys crop up all over the place. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?"

"Only that there's a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn't burning. You ever meet the detective that ran the case?"

"Quentin Lance?" Drake smirked. "It'd be hard to say no, seeing as he's my father."

That slotted a few pieces of information into place for her. For one, why Drake had looked so familiar when she had turned up at the door to Kara's hotel room. Looking closely at the other woman, Kara could certainly see some familiarity to the detective with whom she had spent most of her previous day. It also explained Lance's embittered attitude towards Luthor's legal team.

"Didn't absorb that, huh?" Drake grinned. "It's not your fault. I've been using my mother's maiden name ever since I went into defence law, having a cop for a father wasn't doing me any favours."

"How familial of you."

Drake scoffed. "He disowned me long before I changed my name."

"So you're totally unbiased then?" Kara cocked an eyebrow.

"My father's a good cop," Drake seemed to surprise herself at the sudden jump to his defence. "He's tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department's hard men, so earning the kind of reputation he's got wasn't easy. He ran Mr Luthor's case efficiently enough—"

"Not for Luthor's liking."

Pause. Drake looked her Kara warily. "I said efficiently. I didn't say persistently. My father did his job but—"

"But he doesn't like Meths, right?"

Another pause. "You have quite the ear for the street."

"You pick up the terminology," Kara echoed with a wisp of a smile. "Do you think Lance would have kept the case open if Luthor hadn't been a Meth?"

Drake thought about it for a while. "It's a common enough prejudice," She said slowly. "But I don't think he shut us down because of it. I think he just saw a limited return on his investment. No one saw a quick solution for this one, and Mr Luthor was still alive, so…"

"Better things to do, huh?"

"Yes. Something like that."

Kara stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. Kara could feel an old fury building in her that had nothing to do with her current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps, then The Legion, and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. J'onn J'onzz, Alex Danvers, dying in her arms at Argos, Jimmy…A loser's catalogue, any way you looked at it.

She locked it down.

The scar on her forearm was itching, and there was the curl of nicotine craving in her fingertips. She rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in her pocket. At some indeterminate point that morning she had determined to quit. A thought struck her at random.

"Drake, you chose this sleeve for me, right?"

"Sorry?" She was scanning though a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on Kara. "What did you say?"

"This sleeve. You chose it for me, right?"

She frowned. "No. As far as I know the selection was made by Mr Luthor. We just provided a shortlist according to specifications, though I'm fairly certain this one wasn't on that list."

"No, the documents Singh gave me when I was re-sleeved specifically said Luthor's lawyer handled it. Definitely."

"Oh," The frown deepened. "Mr Luthor has a great many lawyers. He probably routed it through another office. Why?"

Kara grunted. "It's nothing. Whoever owned this body before me was a smoker, and I'm not. It's a real pain."

Drake smiled. "Are you going to give up?"

"If I can find the time. Luthor's deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn't really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning."

"Do you think you can?"

"Give up smoking?"

"No. Crack the case?"

Kara looked at her, deadpan. "I don't really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment."

"Yes, I drew them up," Drake affected a look that bordered on guilty that Kara needed to see to stop her from reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.

"Well, well." She said, and went back to looking out the window.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE'S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN'T

Kara slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made her head buzz. Across the desk, Drake looked at her with a knowing sympathy.

"Is it all like this?" Kara asked.

"Well, it gets less coherent," She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representations of the files Kara was accessing tumbled in shades of blue and green. "This is what we call the R&R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it's not nice, knowing they're out there."

"Lance bring any of them in?"

"It's not his department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but the dissemination technology being the way it is, it's like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they'll get is a few months in storage. It's a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Luthor says we can delete it."

"And nothing new in the last six months?"

Drake shrugged. "The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr Luthor has an undeclared influence at the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder's martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House."

Kara tilted her chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Drake's office was environment-formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Presently, her grey metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best Kara had ever seen.

"Drake, what can you tell me about Lana Lang?"

The silence that ensued pulled Kara's eyes back down to ground level. Dinah Drake was staring off into a corner of the field.

"I suppose my father gave you that name." She said slowly.

"Yeah," Kara sat up. "He said it would give me some insight into Luthor. In fact, he told me to run it by you to see if you rattled."

Drake swivelled to face Kara. "I don't see how this can have a bearing on the case at hand."

"Try me."

"Very well," There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look on her face. "Lana Lang was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Sixty years ago, Luthor was one of her clients. Through a number of indiscretions this became known to Lillian Luthor. The two women met at some function down in San Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Lillian Luthor beat the shit out of Lana Lang."

Kara studied Drake's face across the table, puzzled. "And that's it?"

"No, that's not it, Zor-El," She said tiredly. "Lang was six months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You physically can't fit a spinal stack into a foetus, so that made it real death. Potential three to five decade sentence."

"Was it Luthor's baby?"

Drake shrugged. "Debatable. Lang refused to let them do a gene match on the foetus. Said it didn't matter who that father was. She probably figured the uncertainty was more valuable from the press point of view than a definite no."

"Or she was too distraught?"

"Come on, Zor-El," Drake jerked a hand irritably at her. "This is a Pennytown whore we're talking about."

"Did Lillian Luthor go into storage?"

"No, and that's where my father gets to stick his knife in. Luthor bought off everyone. The witnesses, the press, even Lang took a payoff in the end. Settled out of court. Enough to get her a Lloyd's cloning policy and take her out of the game. Last I heard she was wearing out her second sleeve somewhere down in Brazil. But this was more than half a century ago, Zor-El."

"I take it you weren't around then?"

"No," Drake leaned across the desk. "And more importantly neither was my father, which makes it kind of sickening to hear him whining on about it. Oh, I had an earful about it when I started working for Luthor never mind when they pulled out of the investigation last month. He never even met Lang."

"I think it might be a matter of principle," Kara said gently. "Is Luthor still going to prostitutes on a regular basis?"

"That is none of my business."

Kara stuck her finger through the holodisplay and watched the coloured files distort around the intrusion. "You might have to make it your concern, counsellor. Sexual jealousy's a pretty good sturdy motive for murder, after all."

"May I remind you that Lillian Luthor tested negative on a polygraph when asked that question." Said Drake sharply.

"I'm not talking about Mrs Luthor," Kara stopped playing with the display and stared across the desk at the lawyer before her. "I'm talking about the other million available orifices out there and the even larger number of partners or blood relatives who might not relish seeing some Meth fucking them. That's going to have to include some experts on covert penetration, no pun intended, and maybe the odd psychopath or two. In short, someone who's capable of getting into Luthor's house and torching him."

Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.

"What about it, Drake," Kara waved her hand through the holograph. "Anything in here that begins _for what you did to my girl, daughter, sister, mother, delete as applicable_."

Kara didn't need her to answer. She could see it in her face.

With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the tress across the meadow, Dinah Drake bent to the database keyboard and called up a new purple oblong of holographic light on the display. Kara watched as it bloomed and opened like some Cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind her, another cow voiced it's resigned disgruntlement.

She slipped the headset back on.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

The town was called Ember. Kara found it on a map, about two hundred kilometres north of Star City, on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.

"_Free Trade Enforcer,_"Said Drake, peering over her shoulder. "Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built. Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the town grew up around the site to cater for the tourists."

"Tourists?"

She looked at Kara. "It's a big ship."

She hired an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Drake's office and drove north over the rust-coloured suspension bridge. Kara needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but almost deserted so she stuck to the yellow line in the centre of the road and barrelled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above her head, but Kara eventually found a Neo-Maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of her, and for a while she forgot about the Legion and Argo and everything that had happened after.

By the time Kara hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted angles of the _Free Trade Enforcer's _launch deck, and the last of its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either side of the wreck's shadow.

Drake was right. It was a big ship.

Kara slowed her speed in deference to the rise of buildings around her, wondering idly how anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to shore. It crossed her mind that Luthor might have known. He'd probably been around then.

Ember's main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian railing in wrought iron. There were holograph 'casters fixed to the trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman's face wreathed with the words;

SLIPSLIDE — ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATRE.

Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.

Kara rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the facades, and after a few moments found what she was searching for about two thirds of the way along the front. She coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty meters up, sat still for a few minutes to see if anything happened and then, when it didn't, Kara got out of the car and walked back along the street.

Smoak's Data Linkage broking was a narrow façade sandwiched between an industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where culls screeched and fought over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Smoak's was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the operations room. Kara stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harboured behind a long moulded plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass walled office. The far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the brackets had once resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.

"Help you?"

A thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head around the corner of one of the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.

"Yah. I'm looking for Billy Malone."

"Out front," He gestured back the way Kara had come. "See the old guy on the rail? Watching the wreck? That's him."

Kara looked out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the rail.

"He owns this place, right?"

"Yeah. For his sins," The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. "Not much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is."

Kara thanked him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade, and Anchana Salomao's holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, Kara came up next to the man on the rail and leaned her own arms on the black iron. He looked around as she joined him and gave her a nod of acknowledgement, then went back to staring at the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.

"That's a pretty grim piece of parking." Kara said, gesturing out at the wreck.

It earned a speculative look before he answered her. "They say it was terrorists," His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he had once put too much effort into using it and something had broken. "Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both."

"Maybe they did it for the insurance." Kara offered.

Malone looked at her again, more sharply. "You're not from here?" He asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone that time.

"No. Passing though."

"From Rio?" He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. "You an artist?"

"No."

"Oh," He seemed to consider that for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill he had forgotten. "You move like an artist."

"Near miss. It's military neurachem."

He got it then, but the shock didn't seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes. He looked Kara up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.

"You come looking for me? You from Luthor?"

"You might say that."

He moistened his lips. "Come to kill me?"

Kara took the hardcopy out of her pocket and handed it across to him. "Come to ask you some questions. Did you transmit this?"

He read it, lips moving wordlessly. Inside her head, Kara could hear the words he was tasting again:

. . . _for taking my daughter front me . . . will burn the flesh from your head . . . will never know the hour or the day . . . nowhere safe in this life _. . .

It wasn't highly original, but it was heartfelt and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Drake had shown her on the Rabid & Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the death Luthor had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the outside of Luthor's skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated contents across the room.

"Yes, that's mine." Malone said quietly.

"You're aware that someone assassinated Lionel Luthor last month?"

He handed her back the paper. "That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his own head off."

"Well that is a possibility," Kara conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it into a refuse-filled skip below them on the beach. "But it's not one I'm being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there."

"I didn't do it." Said Malone flatly.

"I figured you'd say that. I might even believe you, except that whoever did kill Luthor got through some very heavy duty security systems, and you used to be a sergeant in the tactical marines. Now I knew some tacs back on Krypton, worked for them for a while, and a few of them were wired for covert wet work."

Malone looked at her curiously. "You a grasshopper?"

"A what?"

"Grasshopper. Offworlder."

"Yeah." If Malone had ever been afraid of her, it was wearing off fast. Kara considered playing the Legionnaire card, but it didn't seem worth it. The man was still talking.

"Luthor don't need to bring in muscle from offworld. What's your angle on this?"

"Private contractor," Kara said. "Find the killer."

Malone snorted. "And you thought it was me."

Kara hadn't though that, but she let it go, because the misconception gave Malone a feeling of superiority that kept the conversation rolling. Something approaching a spark appeared in his eyes.

"You think I could have gotten into Luthor's house? I know I couldn't, because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the lawn."

"Because of your daughter?"

"Yes, because of my daughter," The anger was fuelling his animation. "My daughter and all the others like her. She was only a kid."

He broke off and stared out to sea again. After a moment, he gestured out to the _Free Trade Enforcer_, where Kara could just see small lights glimmering around what must have been a stage set up on the sloping launch deck.

"That was what she wanted. All she wanted. Total Body Theatre. Be like Anchana Salomao and Rhian Li. She went to Star City because she heard there was a connection there, someone who could—"

He jarred to a halt, and looked at her. The datarat had called him old, and for the first time Kara saw why. In spite of his solid sergeant's bulk and barely swelling waistline, the face was old, carved in the harsh lines of long-term pain. He was on the edge of tears.

"She could have made it too. She was beautiful."

He began fumbling for something in his pocket. Kara produced her cigarettes and offered him one. He took it automatically, lit it from the proffered ignition patch on the packet, but he went back to fumbling in his pockets until he'd dug out a small Kodakristal. Kara really didn't want to see it, but he activated it before she could say anything and a tiny cubed image sprang up in the air between them.

He was right. Elizabeth Malone was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a few years younger than Lena Luthor. Whether she had the driving determination and horse-like stamina that one needed for Total Body Theatre, the picture didn't show, but she probably could have given it a good shot.

The holoshot showed her sandwiched between Malone and another woman who was an almost perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older woman's face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiselling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.

"Gone," Said Malone, as if he had guessed who Kara's attention was focused on. "Four years ago. You know what Dipping is?"

Kara shook her head. _Local colour_, J'onn J'onzz said in her ear. Soak it up.

Malone looked up, for a moment Kara thought at the holo of Anchana Salomao, but then she saw that his head was tilted up at the sky beyond.

"Up here," He said, and jarred to a halt the way he had when he mentioned his daughter's youth.

Kara waited.

"Up there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps, it looks like someone is knitting the world a scarf," He looked down at Kara again, eyes shiny. "Felicity said that. Knitting the world a scarf. Some of that scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by numbers."

Then, Kara deduced what was coming, but kept quiet.

"If you're good, like she was, and you've got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites. Moments in the head of a fashion-house princess, ideas of a particle theorist, memories from a king's childhood. There's a market for that sort of stuff. Oh, the society magazines run edited skull-walks of these sorts of people, but it's all authorised, sanitised. Cut for public consumption. No unguarded moments, nothing that could embarrass anybody or damage popularity, just great big plastic smiles on everything. That ain't what people really want."

Kara had her doubts about that. The skull-walk magazines were big on Krypton as well, and the only time their consumers protested was when one of the notables they portrayed was caught in some moment of human weakness. Infidelity and abusive language were usually the biggest generators of public outcry. It made sense. Anyone pitiful enough to want to spend so much time outside their own head wasn't going to want to see the same basic human realities reflected in the gilded skulls of those they admired.

"With mindbites, you get everything," Said Malone with a particular enthusiasm Kara suspected was a graft from his wife's opinions. "The doubt, the muck, the humanity. People will pay for it."

"But it's illegal?"

Malone gestured at the shopfront that bore his wife's name. "The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving policy to pay on both of us, plus Elizabeth. My tac pension wasn't going to be enough. What could we do?"

"How long did she get?" Kara asked him softly.

Malone stared out to sea. "Thirty years."

After a while, the stare fixed on the horizon. "I was okay for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Felicity's body," He half turned towards Kara and coughed out something that might have been a laugh. "Corporation bought it direct from the Star City storage facility. Paid five times what I could have afforded. They say the bitch only wears it alternate months."

"Elizabeth know that?"

He nodded once, like an axe coming down. "She got it out of me, one night. I was jack-happy. Been cruising the stacks all day, looking for business. No handle on where I was or what was going on. You know what she said?"

"No." Kara muttered.

He didn't hear her. His knuckles whitened on the iron railing. "She said, don't worry daddy, when I'm rich, we'll buy mummy back."

It was getting out of hand.

"Look, Malone, I'm sorry about your daughter, but from what I hear she wasn't working the kind of places Luthor goes. Harper's Closed Quarters isn't exactly the Houses is it?"

The ex-tac spun on her without warning, and there was blind murder in his eyes and his crooked hands. All he could see in front of him was Luthor's minion.

That said, you can't jump a Legionnaire – the conditioning won't let it happen. Kara saw the attack almost before he knew he was going to do it himself, and she had the neurachem of her borrowed sleeve online fragments of a second later. He hit low, driving under the guard he thought she'd put up, looking for the body blows that would break her ribs. The guard wasn't there, and nether was Kara. Instead, she stepped inside the hooks of his punches, took him off balance with her weight and tangled one leg amidst his. He stumbled back against the railing and Kara drove a cruel elbow into his solar plexus. His face went grey with the shock. Leaning over, Kara pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork of her thumb and fingers into his throat.

"That's enough." She snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve's neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Legion systems she was accustomed to and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

Kara looked down at Malone.

His eyes were a hand's breadth from Kara, and despite the grip she had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break her grip and damage her.

Kara yanked him off the rail and propped him away from her with a cautionary arm.

"Listen, I'm passing no judgments here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Luthor?"

"Because she told me, motherfucker." The sentence hissed out of him. "She told me what he'd done."

"And what was that?"

He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. "Dirty things," He said. "She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay."

Meal ticket. Don't worry daddy, when I'm rich we'll buy mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you're young, Kara supposed. But nothing came that easy.

"You think that's why she died?"

He turned his head and looked at her as if she was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.

"She didn't die. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her throat."

"Trial transcript said it was a client. Not Luthor."

"How would they know?" He said dully. "They name a body, who knows who's inside it. Who's paying for it all."

"They find him yet?"

"Biocabin whore's killer? What do you think? It ain't exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?"

"That's not what I meant, Malone. You say she turned Luthor in Harper's, I'll believe you. But you've got to admit it doesn't sound like Luthor's style. I've met the man, and slumming?" Kara shook her head. "He doesn't read that way to me."

Malone turned away.

"Flesh," He said. "What you going to read in a Meth's flesh?"

It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the slopping deck of the warship, the performance had started. They both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that they were forever locked out of.

"Elizabeth's still on stack." Kara said quietly.

"Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer that said he could crack Felicity's case," He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his office. "I look like the kind of guy's going to come into some money real soon?"

There was nothing to say after that. Kara left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when she drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn't look around.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

Kara called Drake from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.

"Zor-El. Did you find what you were looking for?"

"Still don't really know what I'm looking for," Kara said cheerfully. "You think Luthor ever does the biocabins?"

She pulled a face. "Oh please."

"Alright here's another one. Did Lana Lang ever work biocabin joints?"

"I really have no idea, Zor-El."

"Well look it up then, I'll hold." Her voice came out stony.

Drake's well-bred distaste wasn't sitting too well beside Billy Malone's anguish for his daughter.

Kara drummed her fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found herself muttering a Kandorian fisherman's rap to the rhythm. Outside, the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

"Here we are," Drake settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. "Lang's Pennytown records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted her."

Luthor would have been quite an entrée to anywhere, but Kara resisted the temptation to say it.

"You got an image there?"

"Of Lang?" Drake shrugged. "Only a two-d. You want me to send it."

"Please."

The ancient car-phone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal and then Lana Lang's features emerged from the static. Kara leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

"Right. Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Malone worked. Harper's Closed Quarters. It's on a street called Weisinger."

"Weisinger and Conway," Drake's disembodied voice came back through from behind Lana Lang's full service pout. "Jesus it's right under the old expressway. That's got to be a safety violation."

"Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?"

"You're going there? Tonight?"

"Drake, these places don't do a lot of business during the day," Kara said patiently. "Of course I'm going there tonight."

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

"It's not a recommended area, Zor-El. You need to be careful."

That time, Kara couldn't be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not to get his hands bloody. Drake must have heard her.

"I'm sending the map." She said stiffly.

Lana Lang's face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. Kara didn't need her any more. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with her. The same lines faintly emergent in Billy Malone's Kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

Lillian Luthor.

_XXX_

There was rain in the air when Kara got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Harper's, Kara watched the blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the 'caster and the image kept fizzling out.

She had been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that she had come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Harper's were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

Kara watched for about an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertinaed octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests – you can't argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at the distance Kara sat. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway's support pillars, but it didn't come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club's interior as if he'd done no more than go out to relive himself.

Kara climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as Kara approached.

"Sell you a disc? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality?"

Kara gave them one smooth sweep, shook her head unhurriedly.

"Stiff?"

Another shake. Kara reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk her, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said 'clear'. One of the arms prodded her gently back at chest height.

"Do you want cabins or bar?"

Kara hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. "What's the deal in her bar?"

"Ha ha ha," Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. "The bar is look, but don't touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too."

"Cabins." Kara said, anxious to ger away from the mechanical barkers software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

"Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile."

Kara went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left at a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if it was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. Kara walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it didn't show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.

Kara had seen that coming and drawn out a sheaf of currency through an auto-bank on the way down through the city. She selected one of the large denomination plastic notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. Her credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind her, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made her twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure thus far. Kara studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman's profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly though hidden speakers. A voice gusted.

'_Do you want to see me see me see me…?'_

Cheap echo box on the vocoder.

Kara pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to Kara. Worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto Kara's.

'_Do you want to touch me touch me touch me…?'_

Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, Kara was getting a definite reaction it all. She felt a sudden throbbing in her core, she locked it down and forced the blood into her muscles the way a combat call would do. She needed to be detached for the scene. She reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to Kara, one hand slid out, cupping.

"Tell me what you want, honey?" She said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

Kara cleared her own. "What's your name?"

"Anemone. Want to know why they call me that?"

Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking softly over.

"You remember a girl that used to work here?" Kara asked.

She was working at Kara's belt then. "Honey, any girl used to work here ain't going to do for you what I am. No, how would you—"

"She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Malone."

Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.

"What the fuck is this? You the Sia?"

"The what?"

"Sia. The heat," Her voice was rising. She stepped away. "We had this—"

"No," Kara took a step toward her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. Kara backed up again, voice low. "No, I'm her mother."

Taut silence. She glared at Kara.

"Bullshit. Lizzie's ma's in the store."

"No. I…I got set out. I don't, I couldn't…"

She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands relaxing almost unwillingly.

"That looks like prime tank flesh to me," She said untrustingly. "You just come out of the store, how come you're not paroled in some bone-bag junkie's sleeve?"

"It's not parole," The Legion's deep-cover training came rocketing in across Kara's mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside of Kara tilted with the joy of mission time. "You know what I went down for?"

"Lizzie said mindbites, something—"

"Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?"

"No. Lizzie never talked much about—"

"Elizabeth didn't know. And it never came out on the wires."

The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. "So who—"

Kara skinned her a smile. "Better you don't know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this."

"Not powerful enough to get you back in your own flesh, though." Anemone's voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was fast approaching, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe the fairy-tale mother come looking for her daughter. "How come your sleeved in this?"

"There's a deal," Kara told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. "This…person…gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs this body. If I do it, I get clone sleeves for me and Elizabeth."

"That so? Why you here?" There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told Kara her parents would never come to this place looking for her.

Kara laid the last pieces of the lie. "There's a problem with the re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone's blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?"

She shook her head, face turned down.

"A lot of the girls get hurt," She said quietly. "But Harper's got insurance to cover that. He's real good about it, even puts us in the store if it's going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn't a regular."

"Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?"

She looked up at Kara, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. Kara had plated Felicity Smoak-Malone to the hilt. "Mrs Malone, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn't be here if they weren't."

Kara made herself wince. "Anyone. Important?"

"I don't know. Look, Mrs Malone, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a couple times when I got down., but we never got close. She was close with Nora, and…" She paused, and added hurriedly. "Nothing like that, you know, but her and Nora, and Will, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything."

"Can I talk to them?"

Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.

"It's better if you. Don't. Harper, you know, he doesn't like us talking to the public. If he catches us…"

Kara put every ounce of Legionnaire persuasiveness into stance and voice. "Well, maybe you could ask for me…"

The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

"Sure. I'll ask around. But not. Not now. You've got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I'll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment."

Kara took her hand in both of her own. "Thank you, Anemone."

"My name's not Anemone," She said abruptly. "I'm called Zoe. Call me Zoe."

"Thank you, Zoe," Kara held onto her hand. "Thank you for doing this—"

"Look, I'm not promising anything," She said with an attempt at roughness. "Like I said, I'll ask. That's all. Now, you go. Please."

She showed Kara how to cancel the remainder of her payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. Kara didn't say anything else. She didn't try to touch Zoe again. She walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.

Lit in red.

Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiation with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let Kara pass and she stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as she passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.

Kara stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. Kara moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing her, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given her. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that J'onn J'onzz would have bawled her out for. She could hear Alex Danvers whispering in her ear.

"You waiting for me?" She asked the Mongol's back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.

Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. "Look," He began weakly.

Kara silenced him with a glance out of the corer of her eye and he shut up.

"I said—"

The was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the hood of the car with a roar and swatted at Kara with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, Kara staggered back two paces. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. Kara twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and Kara moved round him onto the car while the dealers were still tying to work out where she was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards her and Kara smashed the fingers around the metal with a side flung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of Kara's hand cracked into the other dealer's temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. Kara came up into a crouch.

The Mongol took off running.

Kara vaulted the roof of the ground and went after him without thinking. The concrete jarred her feet as she landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but the neurachem damped it down instantly and Kara was only a dozen metres behind. She threw out her chest and sprinted.

Ahead of her, the Mongol bounced around in her field of vision like a combat jet trying to elude fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a good twenty metres ahead. Kara put on speed, wincing at the sharp pain in her chest. Rain slapped at her face.

_Fucking cigarettes._

They broke out from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing, as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at her. Cross now. Cross now. Kara already had. The echoes followed her beseechingly up the streets.

Past the derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn't moved from their kerbside resting places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rose from a grate in the side of the street like something alive. The paving under Kara's feet was slick with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The shoes that had come with Luthor's summer suit were thin-soled and devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept her upright.

The Mongol cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks, saw Kara was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared the last vehicle. Kara tried to adjust her trajectory and cut him off, crossing the street at an angle before she reached the wrecked cars, but her quarry had timed the trap too well. Kara was already on the first wreck, and she skidded trying to stop in time. She bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge stung her hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between them by another ten metres.

A wayward speck moved on the periphery of her vision.

Kara spotted the fleeing figure on the other side of the street and kicked off from the kerb, cursing her decision to not seek out armaments. At the range she found herself, a beam weapon would have carved the Mongol's legs out from under him easily. Instead, she tucked in behind him and tried to find somewhere to close up the gap again. She thought she could panic him into tripping.

That wasn't what happened, but it was close enough. The buildings to the left gave way to waste ground bordered by a sagging fence. The Mongol looked back again and made his first mistake. He stopped, threw himself on the fence, which promptly collapsed, and scrambled over into the darkness beyond. Kara grinned and followed. Finally, she had the advantage.

Perhaps he was hoping to lose himself in the darkness, or expecting her to twist an ankle over the uneven ground. But the Legion conditioning squeezed her pupils into instant dilation in the low-light surroundings and mapped her steps over the uneven surface with lighting speed, and the neurachem put her feet there with a rapidity to match. The ground ghosted by beneath her the way it had beneath Alex Danvers in her dream. Given a hundred metres, she was going to overtake the Mongol, unless he too had augmented vision.

In the event, the waste ground ran out before that, but by then there was barely the original dozen metres between them when they both hit the wire fence in the far side. He scaled the wire, dropped to the ground and started up the street while Kara was still climbing, but then, abruptly, he appeared to stumble. Kara cleared the top of the fence and swung down lightly. He must have heard her drop though, because he spun out of the huddle, still not finished with slipping together the thing in his hands. The muzzle came up and Kara dived for the street.

Kara hit hard, skinning her hands and rolling. Lightning torched the night where she had been. The stink of ozone washed over her and the crackle of disrupted air curled in her ears. Kara kept rolling and the particle blaster lit up again, charring past her shoulder. The damp street hissed with steam in its wake. Kara scrambled for cover that wasn't there.

The Mongol called out in pain, the cry accompanied by a wet squelch. From where she lay, Kara looked up and her eyes latched onto a figure on the rooftop across the street. The tails of a cape lashed around in the wind, plated metal armour glinting in the moonlight. Kara turned her attention to the Mongol, in the middle of wrenching a metallic shaft that had embedded itself in his arm.

The Mongol brought his particle blaster round in a searing arc and the shrouded figure dived to one side. The rooftop light up red with the heat of the discharge as the weapon missed its mark. The shroud jumped back upright, and fired off another projectile, but by that time the Mongol was across the street, had torched down a door and was gone.

Screams from somewhere within.

'_LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!'_

A cluster of pulsating lights dropped vertically from above and the tannoy barked down the night like the voice of a robot god. A searchlight exploded in the street and flooded the area with white fire. Kara screwed up her eyes and could just make out the figure in more detail. A hood delved down into a trailing cloak, metallic plates bulked across the torso and arms, and in the left has was a…bow?

The soft storm of the police transport swept flapping wings of paper and plastic up against the walls of nearby buildings and pinned them there like dying moths.

'_STAND WHERE YOU ARE!'_ The tannoy thundered again. _'LAY DOWN YOUR WEAPON!'_

The archer brought his weapon up in a fluid move and fire off a shot that exploded on the hull and the transport bucked as its pilot tried to compensate for it. Sparks showered off one turbine where the explosion landed and the transport side-slipped badly. Machine-rifle fire answered from a mounting somewhere below the vehicles nose, but the archer was gone.

Kara picked herself slowly up off the ground and watched as the transport settled to within a metre of the ground. An extinguisher canister fumed into life on the smouldering engine canopy and dripped white foam onto the street. Just behind the pilots window, a hatch whined up and Quentin Lance stood framed in the opening.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

**Author's Note; ****The second half of this chapter is smut heavy. If you've gotten this far you've probably noticed that I mentioned there'd be smut in the first Author's note for for this. Just thought I'd give you an extra warning. **

**Also, I've posted the visuals that inspired the versions of Kara and Oliver in this story on Twitter, so go check those out JRW9699**

* * *

The transport was a stripped down version of the one that Lance had picked her up in at Iron Heights, and it was noisy in the cabin. Lance had to shout to make his voice heard over the engines.

"We'll put out a sniffer squad, but he's been able to evade them before. After that we're down to witness sightings. Stone Age stuff. And in this part of town…"

The transport banked and he gestured down at the warren of streets below. "Look at it. The Glades, they call it. Used to be called Lamb Valley way back. They say it was a nice area."

"So what happened?"

Lance shrugged in his steel lattice seat. "Economic crisis. You know how it is. One day you own a house, your sleeve policy's paid up, the next you're on the street looking at a single lifespan."

"That's tough."

"Yeah, isn't it," Said the detective dismissively. "Zor-El, what the fuck were you doing at Harper's?"

"Getting an itch scratched," She growled. "Any laws against it?"

Lance looked at her. "You weren't getting greased in Harper's. You were barley in there ten minutes."

Kara lifted her own shoulders and made an apologetic face. "You ever been downloaded into a body left stewing for Rao knows how long straight out of the tank, you'll know what it's like. Hormones. Things get rushed. Places like Harper's, performance isn't an issue."

Lance's lips curved in something approximating a smile. He leaned forward across the space between them.

"Bullshit, Zor-El. Bull. Shit. I accessed what they've got on you at Kandor. Psychological profile. They call it the Kemmerich gradient, and yours is so steep you'd need pistons and rope to get up it. Everything you do, performance is going to be an issue."

"Well," Kara fed herself a cigarette and ignited it as she spoke. "You know there's a lot can be done for some women in ten minutes."

Lance rolled his eyes and waved the comment away as if it was a fly buzzing around his face.

"Right. And you're telling me with the credit you have from Luthor, Harper's is the best you can afford?"

"It's not about cost." Kara said, and wondered if that was the truth of what brought people like Luthor to The Glades.

Lance leaned his head against the window and looked out at the rain. He didn't look at her. "You're chasing leads. You went down to Harper's to follow up on something Luthor did there. Given time I can find out what that was, but it'd be easier if you just told me."

"Why? You told me the Luthor case was closed. What's your interest?"

That brought his eyes back around to hers, and there was a light in them. "My interest is in keeping the peace. Maybe you haven't noticed, but every time we meet it's to the sound of heavy-calibre gunfire."

Kara spread her hands. "I'm unarmed. All I'm doing is asking questions. And speaking of questions… How come you were sitting on my shoulder when the fun started?"

"Just lucky I guess."

Kara let that go. Lance was tailing her, that much she was certain of. And that in turn meant there had to be more to the Luthor case than he would admit to her.

"What's going to happen to my car?" She asked.

"We'll have it picked up. Notify the rental company. Someone can come and get it from the impound. Unless you want it?"

Kara shook her head.

"Tell me something. Why'd you rent a ground car? On what Luthor's paying you, you could have had one of these." He slapped the bulkhead by his side.

"I like to go places on the ground," She said. "You get a better sense of distance that way. And on Krypton, we don't go up in the air much."

"Really?"

"Really. Listen, the guy who nearly blew you out of the sky back there—"

"Excuse me?" He cranked up one eyebrow in what Kara was beginning to think of as his trademark expression. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we saved your sleeve back there. You were looking up at one serious psycho."

Kara gestured. "Yeah about that. Who the hell still uses a bow and arrow?"

Lance's face screwed up into an expression that made it look like he'd sucked on something bitter. Kara saw in his face the same resentment that had been there when he had talked about Luthor in her room at the Waverider the night before.

"That freak in the hood?" Lance exhaled an imaginary plume of smoke. "Organic damage, real death, got a list of felony's makes even yours look less terrible. He's been leaving a trail of bodies all over the Glades as long as I've been a cop."

That was certainly news to Kara. She'd taken a cursory look into the area surrounding Harper's before making a call on Billy Malone and nothing had indicated that the streets were plagued by an archer in green. Whoever it was, the cops were keeping a lid on it. That was almost as interesting as why the archer had saved her from the Mongol.

"So why'd he try to take out the Mongol? He was waiting for me."

"Waiting for you?" Whatever he really thought, Lance's face was disbelieving. "According to those Stiff dealers we loaded into the wagon, he was buying product. An old customer, they say."

Kara shook her head. "He was waiting for me. I went to talk to him, he took off."

"Maybe he didn't like your face. One of the dealers, I think it was the one whose skull you cracked, said you were looking jacked up to kill someone," He shrugged again. "They say you started it, and it certainly looks that way."

"In that case, why did that archer shoot at the Mongol and not me?"

Lance gritted his teeth and glared back out the window. "He's got a habit of saving helpless women."

If looks could kill, Kara's would have blown a hole through the back of the detective's head.

Unlike his hatred of Luthor, Kara could almost sympathise with, his hatred of the archer seemed deeper somehow. A hint of Legionary intuition told her to push the subject.

"So you've been after this guy for a while then?"

Lance scoffed. "Almost as long as I've been a cop."

"Funny. I met your daughter today and she never mentioned this vendetta."

The mention of his daughter made Lance stiffen up, every muscle in his body visibly tensing. Much like when she had pushed him the night before, Lance seemed to resent the bait instead of rising to it.

"My daughter hasn't known much about me for a long time."

The transport tipped and through the window Kara could see the dim form of the Waverider's tower. She had accepted Lance's offer of a ride in much the same spirt as she had the initial drive to Suntouch House – to see where it would take her. Legionnaire wisdom. Go with the flow, and see what it shows you. She had no reason to suppose Lance was lying to her about their destination, but part of her was still surprised to see the tower. Legionnaire's weren't big on trust.

After an initial wrangle with the Waverider's AI about landing permission, the pilot set them down on a grimy looking drop pad atop the tower. Kara could feel the wind tugging at the transport's lightweight body as they landed, and as the hatch unfolded upwards, the cold came battering aboard. Kara got up to go. Lance stayed where he was, watching her go with a lopsided look that she still couldn't work out. The same tether that she had felt the night before had returned. Kara could feel the need to say something pressing on her like an impending sneeze.

"Hey, how'd the bust go down on Knyazev?"

He shifted in the seat and stuck out one long leg to rest his boot on the chair she had just vacated. A thin smile.

"Grinding through the machine," He said. "We'll get there."

"Good," Kara climbed out into the wind and rain, raising her voice. "Thanks for the lift.

He nodded gravely, then tipped his head back to say something to the pilot behind him. The whine of the turbines built and Kara ducked hurriedly out from under the hatch as it began to close. As she stepped back, the transport unglued itself and lifted away, lights flashing. Kara caught a final glimpse of Lance's face through the rain-steaked window, then the wind seemed to carry the little craft away like an autumn leaf, wheeling away and down toward the streets below. In seconds it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other flyers speckling the night sky. Kara turned and walked against the wind to the drop pad's access staircase. Her suit was sodden from the rain. What possessed Luthor to outfit her for summer with the scrambled weather systems that Star City had exhibited was beyond her. On Krypton, when it was winter, it stayed that way long enough for you to make decisions about your wardrobe.

The upper levels of the Waverider were in darkness relieved only by the occasional glow of dying illuminum tiles, but the hotel obligingly lit her way with neon tubes that flickered on in her path and died out again behind her. It was a weird effect, making her feel as if she was carrying a candle.

"You have a visitor." The hotel's human interface construct fizzled into existence beside her as she got into the elevator and the doors whirred closed.

Kara slammed her hand against the emergency stop button, raw flesh stinging when she'd skinned her palm. "What?"

"You have a visi—"

"Yeah. I heard," It occurred to her, briefly, to wonder if the AI could take offence at her tone. "Who is it, and where are they?"

"She identified herself as Lena Luthor. Subsequent search of the city archives has confirmed sleeve identity. I have allowed her to wait in your room, since she is unarmed and you left nothing of consequence there this morning. Aside from refreshment, she has touched nothing."

Feeling her temper subsiding, Kara found focus on a small dent in the metal of the elevator door and made an attempt at calm.

"This is interesting. Do you make arbitrary decisions like this for all of your guests?"

"Lena Luthor is the daughter of Lionel Luthor," Said the construct reproachfully. "Who in turn is paying for your room. Under the circumstances, I thought it wise not to create unnecessary tension."

Kara looked up at the ceiling of the elevator.

"You been checking up on me?"

"A background check is part of the contract I operate under. Any information retained is wholly confidential, unless subpoenaed under UN directive 231.4."

"Yeah? So what else do you know?"

"Lieutenant Kara Zor-El," Said the construct. "Also known as Flamebird, born Argo City, Krypton, 35th May 191, colonial reckoning. Recruited to UN Protectorate forces 11th September 204. Dishonourably discharged following a betrayal of the Corps on 31st June 212 during a mission and subsequently joined the terrorist organisation known as The Legion—"

"Alright." Inwardly Kara was a little surprised at how deep the AI had got. Most people's search records would dry up the moment the trace went offworld. Interstellar needlecasts were expensive. Unless the Waverider had just broken into Warden Singh's records, which was illegal. Lance's comment about the hotel's previous charge sheet drifted back to her. What kind of crimes did an AI commit anyway?

"It also occurred to me that Miss Luthor is probably here in connection with the matter of her father's death, which you are investigating. I though you would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting in the lobby."

Kara sighed, and unpinned her hand from the elevator's stop button.

"No, I bet she wasn't."

She was seated in the window, nursing a short, ice-filled tumbler and watching the lights of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard. She didn't turn her head when Kara let herself in, so she advanced across the room into her field of vision.

"The hotel told me you were her," Kara said. "In case you were wondering why I didn't un-sleeve myself in shock."

She looked up at her and shook hair back from her face.

"Very dry, Miss Zor-El. Should I applaud?"

Kara shrugged. "You might say thank you for the drink."

She examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes up again.

"Thank you for the drink."

"Don't mention it," Kara went to the drinks cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there. A bottle of fifteen-year old single malt presented itself. Kara uncorked it, sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping her eyes on her hands as they poured. "Have you been waiting long?"

"About an hour. Dinah Drake told me you'd gone to The Glades, so I guessed you'd be back late. Did you have some trouble?"

Kara held onto the first mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Knyazev had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. She grimaced.

"Now why would you think that, Miss Luthor?"

She made an elegant gesture with one hand. "No reason. Do you not want to talk about it?"

"Not particularly."

Kara sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where Kara was sitting Lena Luthor was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. Kara kept her eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.

"Well," She cleared her throat. "What would you like to talk about?"

Kara waved her glass at her. "Let's start with why you're here."

"I want to know what progress you've made."

"You can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I'll file one with Dinah Drake before I go out. Come on, Miss Luthor. It's late. You can do better than that."

For a moment Kara thought Lena might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her glass in both hands, bent her head over as if in search of inspiration and after a long moment looked up again.

"I want you to stop." She said.

Kara let the words sink into the darkened room.

"Why?"

Kara saw her lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.

"Why not?" She said.

"Well," Kara sipped at her drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in her mouth to shut down the hormones. "To begin with, there's your father. He's made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health. Then there's the fifty million dollars. And after that, well then we get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be honest, I'm curious."

"Fifty million isn't so much money, I'm worth several times that, never mind my father's fortune," She said with an edge that Kara didn't much like, then her tone became more careful. "And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place for you to go where my father would never find you."

"Yes. That leaves my word, and my curiosity."

Lena sat forward over her drink. "Let's not pretend, Miss Zor-El. My father didn't contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound."

"I'm still curious."

"Maybe I could satisfy that." She said softly.

Kara swallowed more whisky. "Yeah? Did you kill your father, Miss Luthor?"

She made an impatient gesture. "I'm not talking about your game of detectives. You are…curious about other things, are you not?"

"I'm sorry?" Kara looked at her over the rim of her glass.

Lena Luthor pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath the sheer material of her leotard.

"Do you know what Merge Nine is?" She asked, a little unsteadily.

"Empathin?" Kara dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew she knew back on Krypton, people she had fallen in with after the demise of The Legion. The Little Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. They said it welded them into a tighter team. Kara said it made them a bunch of fucking psychopaths.

"Yes, empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This sleeve…" She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the curves. "This is state-of-the-art biochem tech, I designed it myself. I secrete Merge Nine when … aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my cunt, Miss Zor-El."

And she came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled silently around her feet and she stepped over it towards Kara.

Well there's Nim An-Dor, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia incarnations, and then there's reality. In reality, and whatever is costs, there are some things you don't turn away from.

Kara met her halfway across the room, Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her body and the water vapour on her breath. Kara drew in a deep breath and felt the chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of her stomach. Her drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that held it was moulded around one of Lena Luthor's jutting breasts. She drew Kara's head with hands on either side and Kara found it there again. Merge Nine in the beads of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. Kara tugged at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing and finding one nipple with her mouth.

Above her Kara felt Lena's mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into her sleeve's brain, tripping the dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that the other woman was generating. Knew as well that Lena would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in Kara's mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Lena Luthor was beginning to moan then, as they sank to the floor and Kara moved back and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over her face. Lena's hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at her flanks and the throbbing ache between her legs. They scrambled feverishly at each other's clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and when they had shed everything they wore the rug beneath them seemed to lay individual strands of heat on their skin. Kara settled over Lena and her tongue glided over the smoothness of her belly, her mouth leaving wet Os on its path downward. There was the deep salt taste as Kara's tongue tracked down the creases of Lena's cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to press and lick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of the world, Lena's fingers closed over the wetness at Kara's core, and stroked gently.

Blending, their climaxes built rapidly with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals of the Merge Nine union blurred until Kara could find no distinction between the excruciating tautness of the motions of Lena's fingers and the pressure of her own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside the other woman. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it came from Kara was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into a mutual sensory overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then suddenly Lena was laughing at the warm, wet splash over her face and fingers and Kara was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest swept her away.

For a while there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from them both. Then, gift of the long period her sleeve had spent in the tank, the sweaty images of Anemone pressed against the glass of the bio cabin, her arousal began to build again. Lena Luthor seemed to sense it and ran the tip of her tongue along Kara's cunt, licking off the remnant of her orgasm, then swung around and settled between Kara's legs. Her hand pressed forward, fingers curling and Kara let out a long, warm groan. Lena leaned forward over Kara, breasts swinging, and Kara craned and sucked hungrily at the elusive globes. Her hands came up to grasp there too.

Then the motion.

The second time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than sexual. Taking her cue from the signals that were gusting out of Kara's sensorium, Lena Luthor settled into a slow churning motion while Kara watched her taut belly and outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason she could discern, the Waverider piped a slow, deep raga beat in from the corners of the room, and a lighting effect patterned the ceiling above them with swirling blotches of red and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came the dapple their bodies, Kara felt her mind tilting with it and her perceptions slid sideways out of focus. There was only the rocking of Lena Luthor's fingers in her, and fragmented glimpses of Lena's body and face wrapped in coloured light. When she came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman between her legs than her own sleeve.

Later, as they lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive peaks and troughs, she said. "What do you think of me?"

Kara looked down the length of her body to what Lena's hand was doing, and cleared her throat.

"Is that a trick question?"

She laughed, the same throaty laugh her mother had laughed in the chart room at Suntouch House.

"No. I want to know."

"Do you care?" It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it of its brutal overtones.

"You think that's what it is to be a Meth?" The word sounded strange on her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. "You think we don't care about anything young?"

"I don't know," Kara said truthfully. "It's a point of view that I've heard. Living hundreds of years is bound to change your perspectives."

"Yes it does," Her breath caught slightly as Kara's fingers slipped inside her. "Yes, like that. But I'm not my parents, Miss Zor-El, I'm only 50 years old."

"Is that right?"

"Yes, it is. So what do you think of me?"

Kara leaned over her and looked at the young woman's body she inhabited, the fine lines of her face and the old eyes. Kara was still stoned on the Merge Nine, and she couldn't find a flaw anywhere in the other woman. She was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Kara gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed her head to kiss her on one breast.

"Lena Luthor, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to possess you."

She staved off a chuckle. "I'm serious. Do you like me?"

"What kind of question—"

"I'm serious." The words were grounded deeper than empathin. Kara pulled some control and looked her in the eyes.

"Yes," She said simply. "I like you."

Her voice lowered into her throat. "Do you like what we did?"

"Yes, I like what we did."

"Do you want more?"

"Yes, I want more."

She sat up to face Kara. The come hither motions of her fingers grew harder, more demanding. Her voice hardened to match. "Say it again."

"I want more. Of you."

She pushed Kara down with a hand flat on her chest and leaned over her. Kara could feel the traces of her own arousal against her thighs. Lena started to time her motions, slow and sharp.

"Out west," She murmured. "About five hours away by cruiser, there's an island. No one goes there, there's a fifty kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it's beautiful. I've built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving facility," Her voice got an uneven edge in it again. "I sometimes decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what I'm offering you?"

Kara made a noise. The image Lena had just planted, of being the focus of a pack of bodies like that one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notices of her arousal, and Lena's fingers slid in and out fluidly, as if machined there.

"What was that?" She leaned over Kara, her breasts brushing against Kara's.

"How long?" Kara managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of her stomach muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. "Is this fun park invitation good for?"

She grinned down, a grin of pure lechery.

"Unlimited rides." She said.

"But for a limited period only, right?"

She shook her head. "No, you don't understand me. This place is mine. All of it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it."

"That might take a long time."

"No," There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head that time and her gaze fell a little. "No it won't."

The pistoning action of her fingers slackened fractionally, Kara groaned and grabbed at her wrist, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle Lena, and she went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed Kara her breasts or supplement her fingers with sucking and licking. Kara's time perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak Kara could hear herself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.

As the orgasm loomed, Kara was vaguely aware though the Merge Nine link that Lena was sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with uncontrolled desire completely at odds with the calculation with which she manipulated Kara. Fine-tuned by the empathin, she brought her own peak a few seconds before Kara's and as she started to come, Lena smeared her own juices hard over Kara's face and thrashing body.

Whiteout.

And when Kara came to, much later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across her like a lead weight, Lean was gone like a fever dream.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 15**

When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with the night before has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When she had been younger, on leave, Kara used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of whatever city she happened to find herself in. That got a couple of people stabbed, none of them Kara. Later on, she realised joining the military wasn't much different; brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but it turned out to be just as squalid. She shouldn't have been surprised, after all, the marine corps recruiter had really only cared that she had taken a life before she had turned 13.

After joining The Legion Kara developed a less destructive response to chemical malaise. When a forty minute swim in the Waverider's underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Lena Luthor's torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, Kara did the only thing she felt equipped for. She ordered painkillers from room service and went shopping.

Star City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time Kara finally hit the streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. She stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began looking at windows.

A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle had taught her to shop, back on Krypton. Prior to that, Kara had employed a technique best described as precision purchase. She identified her target, went in, got it, and left. If she couldn't get what she wanted, she'd cut her losses and get out equally fast. The Corps never left her with much shore leave, and before that she'd been too young to care. Over the period that they spent together, Serenity weaned her off that approach, and sold Kara her philosophy of consumer grazing.

"Look," Serenity had told her one day in a Kandor coffee house. "Shopping – actual, physical shopping – could have been phased out centuries ago if they'd wanted it that way."

"They who?"

"People. Society." She waved a hand impatiently. "Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?"

At twenty years old, a marine corps grunt via the streets of Argo City, it told her nothing. Carlyle took in her blank look and sighed.

"It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you've got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalised poor. But you've also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now, why would they do that, if they didn't enjoy it?"

Kara vaguely remembered shrugging, maintaining her youthful cool.

"Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It's so basically fucking human when you think about it. You've got to learn to love it, Kara. I mean you can cross this whole archipelago on a hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn't take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Kara. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty."

Enjoyment wasn't exactly what Kara was feeling as she entered Star City's shopping district, but she stuck with it, and stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle's creed. She started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled her into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.

The boots were followed by loose navy trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from the waist to a tight neck. She had seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Star City up to that point. Surface assimilation. It would do. Kara dumped Luthor's summer suit in a skip on the street outside and left the shoes beside it.

Before she left it, Kara searched through the pockets and came up with two cards; the doctor at Iron Heights, and an armourer.

Dinah Drake had provided it with her on a whim, mentioning that if she needed weapons, Lionel Luthor had a long history with the business. The ornate script read _Larkin & Green — Armourers since 2203_. Below was a single string of numbers.

Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Green. The autocab she hired had some blurb about the area, but Kara skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner façade, extending less than a dozen metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been annexed. Kara pushed through the well cared for wooden doors and into the cool, oil smelling interior.

Inside, the place reminded her of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space below the gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under Kara's newly booted feet was carpeted.

A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. "May I be of assistance, madam?"

"I'm Kara Zor-El. I'm here from Lionel Luthor," She said, tipping her head back to meet the mandroid's gaze. "I'm looking for some hardware."

"Of course, madam," The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics that Kara could detect. "We were told to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself."

The head disappeared and a murmured conversation Kara had vaguely registered when she had walked in was resumed. She located the drinks cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars, and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge of her Merge Nine hangover, but Kara knew she was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, Kara realised that she'd gone the day without a cigarette. She wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than her.

The next case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. Those too were dated in the last century. Kara was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel when she heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind her.

"Has madam found anything to her liking?"

Kara turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypical human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick back-combed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend Mars Expo _2076_.

"Just looking," Kara said and gestured back at the guns. "These are made of wood?"

The green photo-receptor gaze regarded her gravely. "That is correct, madam. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was madam interested in?"

Kara looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between the functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.

"They're a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical."

"Certainly. Can we assume madam is not a novice in this field?"

Kara grinned at the machine. "We can assume that."

"Then perhaps madam would care to tell me what her preferences in the past have been."

"Smith & Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn't in this sleeve."

The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn't been programmed for light conversation with Legionnaires.

"And what exactly is madam looking for in this sleeve?"

Kara shrugged. "Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith."

The mandroid became quite still. Kara could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. She wondered briefly how a machine like that had come to wind up there. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Krypton, there weren't many mandroids. They were expensive to build, compared to a synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that required a human form were better done by those organic alternatives. The truth was that a robot human was a pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which really worked better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot Kara seen on Krypton had been a gardening crab.

The photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing's posture unlocked. "If madam would care to come this way. I believe I have the right combination."

Kara followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the décor of the back wall that she hadn't seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibreglass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the business-like rattle of hardware in practiced hands. The mandroid led her to a tall dark-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromagnetic bolt thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as they approached.

"Chip?" He nodded at the machine and ignored Kara.

"Leo, this is Kara Zor-El. She's a friend of Mr Luthor, looking for equipment. I'd like you to show her the Nemex and a Phillips gun, and then pass her onto Lisa for a blade weapon."

Leo nodded again and set aside the electromag.

"This way." He said.

The mandroid touched her arm. "Should madam require anything further, I shall be in the storeroom."

It bowed fractionally and left. Kara followed Leo along the rows of packing crates to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to Kara with it in his hands.

"Second series Nemesis X," He said, holding out the gun. "The Nemex. Manufactured under licence for Mannlicher-Schoenaur. Fires a jacketed slug with a customised propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a fire fight. Feel the weight."

Kara took the weapon and turned it over in her hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson, but well balanced. She swapped it from hand to hand for a while, getting the feel for it, squinted down the sight. Leo waited beside her patiently.

"Alright," Kara handed it back. "And something subtle?"

"Phillips squeeze gun," Leo reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. "A solid steel load. Uses and electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil, and you've got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten."

"Batteries?"

"Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you're losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets."

"Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can test these out?"

"Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and that's perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it."

"Alright, fine," Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet thorough her skull. But the ache in Kara's head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Target practice wasn't going to do her any favours. She didn't bother asking the price either. It wasn't her money she was spending. "Ammunition?"

"Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?"

"Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns."

"Ten clips, each?" There was a dubious respect in Leo's voice. Ten clips was a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but Kara had discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. "And you wanted a blade right?"

"That's right."

"Lisa!"

Leo turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with dark coiffed hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matt grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked around when she heard her name, remembered she was wearing the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Leo waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.

"Lise, this gal's looking for steel. You want to help her out?"

"Sure," The woman reached out a lanky arm. "Name's Lisa Snart, Leo's my brother. What kind of steel you looking for?"

Kara matched her grip. "Kara Zor-El. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it's got to be small. Something I can strap to my forearm."

"Alright," She said amiably. "Want to come with me? You finished here?"

Leo nodded at her. "I'll take this stuff to Chip, and he'll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?"

"Carry out."

"Thought so."

Lisa's end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.

"Tebbit knife," She said inconsequentially. "Very nasty."

And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleased the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette's head.

"Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There's a flint set in the pommel for weighting and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don't get them with the sharp end."

Kara stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor's edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters teched into it. Kara tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code she didn't recognise. Light glinted off the grey metal.

"What's this?"

"What?" Lisa moved to stand beside her. "Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with haemoglobin. Well away from the edges, so if you catch yourself there's no problem, but if you sink it into anything with blood…"

"Charming."

"Told you it was nasty, didn't I?" There was pride in her voice.

"I'll take it."

Back out on the street, weighed down with her purchases, it occurred to Kara that she'd need a jacket after all, if only to conceal her newly acquired arsenal. She cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. She thought, at last, that her hangover was beginning to recede.

She was three blocks down the hill before she realised that she was being tailed.

It was the Legion conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told her. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of her eye once too often. Her shadow as good. In a more crowded part of town she might have missed it, but the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.

The Tebbit knife was strapped to her left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns were accessible without making it obvious she'd spotted her shadow. Kara debating trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to her. It wasn't her town, she felt sludgy with chemicals, and she was carrying too much. Kara decide to let whoever it was go shopping with her.

She picked up her pace a little and worked her way gradually into the commercial centre, where she found an expensive calf-length red wool coat. It wasn't quite what she'd had in mind, yet she was drawn to it all the same. The coat was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop's glass front, Kara managed to catch a glimpse of her tail's face. young. Caucasian. Dark hair. She didn't know him.

The two of them crossed Nelson Plaza, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system had begun to sound plaintive. There was a good chance Kara could have slipped away in the crowd, but by then she couldn't be bothered. If her tail was going to do anything other than watch, she reasoned, he would have taken his chance in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on in the city centre for a hit. Kara steered her way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Waverider.

On her way down Mission Street, Kara stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street vendor. Instantly her head flooded with images. She was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more than they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way. Structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view, heavy rounded pendants nestling glans-like in sweat beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.

A tide of cool swept in across her, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. Kara found herself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machines, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.

Betathanatine. The Reaper.

It was the final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research projects early in the millennium, Betathanatine brought the human body as close to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinic functioning of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.

It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin's Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from the bone.

The last time Kara had used Betathanatine had been in street battles on Starhaven. A full dose, designed to bring body temperatures down to room normal and slow her heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Starhavenite spider tanks. With no register on infrared, they had been able to get up close, scale a leg and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as quick as new-born kittens.

"Got Stiff." Said a horse voice redundantly.

Kara blinked away the broadcast and found herself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at her like bat eyes. On Krypton there had been very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcast could generate the same kind of violence as slipping someone's drink in a wharf-front bar. Kara shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered back against a shop front.

"Hey—"

"Don't piss in my head, friend. I don't like it."

Kara saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Kara got the soft of his eyes under her stiffened fingers…

And was face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres tall. Tentacles writhed at her and her hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. Kara gorge rose and her throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, Kara pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.

"You want to keep on seeing, you'll unplug that shit." She said tightly.

The mound of flesh vanished and she was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.

"Alright, chill, alright," He held up his hands, palms out. "You don't want the stuff, don't buy it. I'm just trying to make a living here."

Kara stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.

"Where I came from, you don't go into people's heads on the street." She offered by way of explanation. But he'd already sensed her retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which Kara assume was obscene.

"I give a fuck where you're from? Fucking grasshopper. Get out of my face."

Kara left him there, wondering idly as she crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the Lena Luthor building Merge Nine into her sleeve.

She paused on a corner and bent her head to kindle a cigarette.

Mid-afternoon. Her first of the day.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter** **17**

As Kara dressed in the mirror later that evening, she suffered the hard edged conviction that someone else was wearing her sleeve and that she had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.

Psychoentirety rejection they called it. Or, to the layman, fragmenting. It wasn't unusual to get tremors, even for an experienced sleeve-changer like Kara, but stood looking into the mirror in the Waverider Parlour suite, Kara was having the worst case she'd had for years. For long moments, she was terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the woman in the mirror noticed her presence. Frozen, she watched her reflection adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap Fibregrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The woman in the mirror settled the Nemex under her left arm where it would be hidden by her jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of her back. She practiced snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, but there was no need. The virtual practice disks had lived up to Leo's promises. She was ready to kill someone behind with either weapon.

Kara shifted behind her borrowed eyes.

Reluctantly, she stripped off the guns and the knife and laid them once more on the bed. Then she stood for a while until the unreasonable feeling of nakedness had passed.

The weakness of weapons, J'onn J'onzz had called it, and from day one in Legionnaire training it was considered a cardinal sin to fall for it.

_A weapon – any weapon – it is a tool, he told them. Cradled in his arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool was, and only useful for that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Legionnaires. _

_In the ranks, Alex Danvers coughed her amusement. At the time, she had spoken for most of them. Most members of The Legion had some form of military training, ex Protectorate conventional forces, places where weapons generally held a status somewhere between that of toy and personal fetish. UN marines went everywhere armed, even on furlough. _

_J'onn J'onzz heard the cough and caught Alex's eye. _

'_Miss Danvers. You do not agree?'_

_Alex shifted, a little abashed at how easily she had been picked out. 'Well, sir. My experience has been that the more punch you carry, the better account you give of yourself.'_

_There was a faint ripple of assent through the ranks. J'onn J'onzz waited until it subsided. _

'_Indeed.' He said, and held out the particle thrower in both hands. 'This…device punches somewhat. Please come here and take it.'_

_Alex hesitated a little, but then pushed her way to the front and took the weapon. J'onn J'onzz fell back so Alex was centre stage before the assembled trainees and stripped off his jacket. In the sleeveless coveralls and worn boots, he looked very vulnerable. _

'_You will see,' He said loudly. 'That the charge setting is at Test. If you hit me, it will result in a small first degree burn, nothing more. I am at a distance of approximately five metres. I am unarmed. Miss Danvers, would you care to attempt to mark me? On your call.'_

_Alex looked startled, but she duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the man opposite her. _

'_On your call.' He repeated. _

'_Now.' She snapped._

_It was almost impossible to follow. Alex was swinging the Sunjet as the word left her mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, she cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower's characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. J'onn J'onzz was not there. Somehow he had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, he had closed the five metre gap by half and the jacket in his right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. He was on Alex before she realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training field, tripping and tumbling her and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under her nose. _

_The moment stretched and then broke as the man sat next to Kara pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. J'onn J'onzz bowed his head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to his feet and helped Alex up. _

'_A weapon is a tool,' He repeated, a little breathlessly. 'A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as a Legionnaire, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. They are an extension – you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.'_

Shrugging her way into the wool jacket, she met her own eyes in the mirror once more. The face she saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. She stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at a scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and Kara left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through her nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, she forced a grin.

_Got the frags, J'onn._

_Breathe, he said. Move. Control._


End file.
